OPO: Making Decision-Focused Data Acquisition Decisions

We propose a model for making data acquisition decisions for variables in contextual stochastic optimisation problems. Data acquisition decisions are typically treated as separate and fixed. We explore problem settings in which the acquisition of contextual variables is costly and consequently constrained. The data acquisition problem is often solved heuristically for proxy objectives such as coverage. The more intuitive objective is the downstream decision quality as a result of data acquisition decisions. The whole pipeline can be characterised as an optimise-then-predict-then-optimise (OPO) problem. Analogously, much recent research has focused on how to integrate prediction and optimisation (PO) in the form of decision-focused learning. We propose leveraging differentiable optimisation to extend the integration to data acquisition. We solve the data acquisition problem with well-defined constraints by learning a surrogate linear objective function. We demonstrate an application of this model on a shortest path problem for which we first have to set a drone reconnaissance strategy to capture image segments serving as inputs to a model that predicts travel costs. We ablate the problem with a number of training modalities and demonstrate that the differentiable optimisation approach outperforms random search strategies.