Attend the IE Seminar Series with Simge Küçükyavuz, April 10

The Industrial Engineering Seminar Series from the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence brings leading researchers and industry experts to share leading-edge ideas shaping the future of optimization, data science and complex systems. Join us to explore innovative methods, real-world applications and emerging challenges driving impactful research and practice.

Abstract
Causal discovery is the fundamental task of inferring underlying cause-and-effect relationships from observational data, a crucial step to enable robust prediction and effective intervention in complex systems. Applications range from deciphering protein signaling networks in biology to identifying root causes in industrial systems. This talk presents optimization-based approaches for learning Directed Acyclic Graphs, or Bayesian networks, from continuous data generated by linear Gaussian structural equation models. First, we introduce a mixed-integer optimization framework that overcomes the limitations of state-of-the-art methods in terms of optimality guarantees and restrictive noise assumptions. We demonstrate that this framework handles heteroscedastic noise and achieves optimality via a branch-and-bound procedure equipped with a novel early stopping criterion. Second, we address the computational challenges of the L0-penalized maximum likelihood estimator for learning Bayesian networks. We propose a new coordinate descent algorithm that is scalable and, despite the non-convexity of the loss function and the combinatorial constraints, converges asymptotically to the optimal objective value. Finally, we review recent results on related mixed-integer convex optimization problems, focusing on the convexification of resulting sets and efficient algorithms for special cases.

Bio
Simge Küçükyavuz is Chair and David A. and Karen Richards Sachs Professor in the Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences Department at Northwestern University. An expert in mixed-integer, large-scale, and stochastic optimization, she is an INFORMS Fellow and the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the INFORMS Computing Society Prize. In addition to serving as the past chair of ICS, president of the Association of Chairs of OR Departments, or ACORD, and chair-elect of the INFORMS Optimization Society, she has served on the editorial boards of Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Operations Research, SIAM Journal on Optimization, and the INFORMS Journal on Computing.

IE Seminar Series: Simge Küçükyavuz
Friday, April 10, 2026
10:30–11:30 a.m.
Artisan Court at the Brickyard (BYAC) 110, Tempe campus [map]