Technical Note—Improved Sample-Complexity Bounds in Stochastic Optimization

Real-world network-optimization problems often involve uncertain parameters during the optimization phase. Stochastic optimization is a key approach introduced in the 1950s to address such uncertainty. This paper presents improved upper bounds on the number of samples required for the sample-average approximation method in stochastic optimization. It enhances the sample complexity of existing approaches in this setting, providing faster approximation algorithms for any method that employs this framework. This work is particularly relevant for solving problems like the stochastic Steiner tree problem.