Surrogate Models

Some industrial applications require modeling complex processes that can result either in highly nonlinear functions or functions defined by a simulation process. In those contexts, optimization solvers often struggle. The reason may be that relaxations of the nonlinear functions are not good enough to make the solver prove an acceptable bound in a reasonable amount of time. Another issue may be that the solver is not able to represent the functions.

An approach that has been proposed in the literature is to approximate the problematic nonlinear functions via neural networks with ReLU activation and use MIP technology to solve the constructed approximation (see e.g. Heneao Maravelias 2011, Schweitdmann et.al. 2022). This use of neural networks can be motivated by their ability to provide a universal approximation (see e.g. Lu et.al. 2017). This use of ML models to replace complex processes is often referred to as surrogate models.

In the following example, we approximate a nonlinear function via Scikit-learn MLPRegressor and then solve an optimization problem that uses the approximation of the nonlinear function with Gurobi.

The purpose of this example is solely illustrative and doesn’t relate to any particular application.

The function we approximate is the 2D peaks function.

The function is given as

\[\begin{split} \begin{aligned} f(x) = & 3 \cdot (1-x_1)^2 \cdot \exp(-x_1^2 - (x_2+1)^2) - \\ & 10 \cdot (\frac{x_1}{5} - x_1^3 - x_2^5) \cdot \exp(-x_1^2 - x_2^2) - \\ & \frac{1}{3} \cdot \exp(-(x_1+1)^2 - x_2^2). \end{aligned}\end{split}\]

In this example, we want to find the minimum of \(f\) over the interval \([-2, 2]^2\):

\[y = \min \{f(x) : x \in [-2,2]^2\}.\]

The global minimum of this problem can be found numerically to have value \(-6.55113\) at the point \((0.2283, -1.6256)\).

Here to find this minimum of \(f\), we approximate \(f(x)\) through a neural network function \(g(x)\) to obtain a MIP and solve

\[\hat y = \min \{g(x) : x \in [-2,2]^2\} \approx y.\]

First import the necessary packages. Before applying the neural network, we do a preprocessing to extract polynomial features of degree 2. Hopefully this will help us to approximate the smooth function. Besides, gurobipy, numpy and the appropriate sklearn objects, we also use matplotlib to plot the function, and its approximation.

import gurobipy as gp
import numpy as np
from gurobipy import GRB
from matplotlib import cm
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from sklearn import metrics
from sklearn.neural_network import MLPRegressor
from sklearn.pipeline import make_pipeline
from sklearn.preprocessing import PolynomialFeatures

from gurobi_ml import add_predictor_constr

Define the nonlinear function of interest

We define the 2D peak function as a python function.

def peak2d(x1, x2):
    return (
        3 * (1 - x1) ** 2.0 * np.exp(-(x1**2) - (x2 + 1) ** 2)
        - 10 * (x1 / 5 - x1**3 - x2**5) * np.exp(-(x1**2) - x2**2)
        - 1 / 3 * np.exp(-((x1 + 1) ** 2) - x2**2)
    )

To train the neural network, we make a uniform sample of the domain of the function in the region of interest using numpy’s arrange function.

We then plot the function with matplotlib.

x1, x2 = np.meshgrid(np.arange(-2, 2, 0.01), np.arange(-2, 2, 0.01))
y = peak2d(x1, x2)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(subplot_kw={"projection": "3d"})
# Plot the surface.
surf = ax.plot_surface(x1, x2, y, cmap=cm.coolwarm, linewidth=0.01, antialiased=False)
# Add a color bar which maps values to colors.
fig.colorbar(surf, shrink=0.5, aspect=5)
plt.show()
example1 2DPeakFunction

Approximate the function

To fit a model, we need to reshape our data. We concatenate the values of x1 and x2 in an array X and make y one dimensional.

X = np.concatenate([x1.ravel().reshape(-1, 1), x2.ravel().reshape(-1, 1)], axis=1)
y = y.ravel()

To approximate the function, we use a Pipeline with polynomial features and a neural-network regressor. We do a relatively small neural-network.

# Run our regression
layers = [30] * 2
regression = MLPRegressor(hidden_layer_sizes=layers, activation="relu")
pipe = make_pipeline(PolynomialFeatures(), regression)
pipe.fit(X=X, y=y)
Pipeline(steps=[('polynomialfeatures', PolynomialFeatures()),
                ('mlpregressor', MLPRegressor(hidden_layer_sizes=[30, 30]))])
In a Jupyter environment, please rerun this cell to show the HTML representation or trust the notebook.
On GitHub, the HTML representation is unable to render, please try loading this page with nbviewer.org.


To test the accuracy of the approximation, we take a random sample of points, and we print the \(R^2\) value and the maximal error.

X_test = np.random.random((100, 2)) * 4 - 2

r2_score = metrics.r2_score(peak2d(X_test[:, 0], X_test[:, 1]), pipe.predict(X_test))
max_error = metrics.max_error(peak2d(X_test[:, 0], X_test[:, 1]), pipe.predict(X_test))
print(f"R2 error {r2_score}, maximal error {max_error}")
R2 error 0.9998438850440962, maximal error 0.08034875279159781

While the \(R^2\) value is good, the maximal error is quite high. For the purpose of this example we still deem it acceptable. We plot the function.

fig, ax = plt.subplots(subplot_kw={"projection": "3d"})
# Plot the surface.
surf = ax.plot_surface(
    x1,
    x2,
    pipe.predict(X).reshape(x1.shape),
    cmap=cm.coolwarm,
    linewidth=0.01,
    antialiased=False,
)
# Add a color bar which maps values to colors.
fig.colorbar(surf, shrink=0.5, aspect=5)
plt.show()
example1 2DPeakFunction

Visually, the approximation looks close enough to the original function.

Build and Solve the Optimization Model

We now turn to the optimization model. For this model we want to find the minimal value of y_approx which is the approximation given by our pipeline on the interval.

Note that in this simple example, we don’t use matrix variables but regular Gurobi variables instead.

m = gp.Model()

x = m.addVars(2, lb=-2, ub=2, name="x")
y_approx = m.addVar(lb=-GRB.INFINITY, name="y")

m.setObjective(y_approx, gp.GRB.MINIMIZE)

# add "surrogate constraint"
pred_constr = add_predictor_constr(m, pipe, x, y_approx)

pred_constr.print_stats()
Restricted license - for non-production use only - expires 2027-11-29
Warning for adding constraints: zero or small (< 1e-13) coefficients, ignored
Model for pipe:
126 variables
61 constraints
6 quadratic constraints
60 general constraints
Input has shape (1, 2)
Output has shape (1, 1)

Pipeline has 2 steps:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Step            Output Shape    Variables              Constraints
                                                Linear    Quadratic      General
================================================================================
poly_feat             (1, 6)            6            0            6            0

dense                (1, 30)           60           30            0           30 (relu)

dense0               (1, 30)           60           30            0           30 (relu)

dense1                (1, 1)            0            1            0            0


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now call optimize. Since we use polynomial features the resulting model is a non-convex quadratic problem. In Gurobi, we need to set the parameter NonConvex to 2 to be able to solve it.

m.Params.TimeLimit = 20
m.Params.MIPGap = 0.1
m.Params.NonConvex = 2

m.optimize()
Set parameter TimeLimit to value 20
Set parameter MIPGap to value 0.1
Set parameter NonConvex to value 2
Gurobi Optimizer version 13.0.2 build v13.0.2rc1 (linux64 - "Ubuntu 24.04 LTS")

CPU model: AMD EPYC 7R13 Processor, instruction set [SSE2|AVX|AVX2]
Thread count: 1 physical cores, 2 logical processors, using up to 2 threads

Non-default parameters:
TimeLimit  20
MIPGap  0.1
NonConvex  2

Optimize a model with 61 rows, 129 columns and 1046 nonzeros (Min)
Model fingerprint: 0xc1e4199c
Model has 1 linear objective coefficients
Model has 6 quadratic constraints
Model has 60 simple general constraints
  60 MAX
Variable types: 129 continuous, 0 integer (0 binary)
Coefficient statistics:
  Matrix range     [1e-13, 1e+00]
  QMatrix range    [1e+00, 1e+00]
  QLMatrix range   [1e+00, 1e+00]
  Objective range  [1e+00, 1e+00]
  Bounds range     [2e+00, 2e+00]
  RHS range        [1e-02, 7e-01]
  QRHS range       [1e+00, 1e+00]

Presolve added 85 rows and 22 columns
Presolve time: 0.01s
Presolved: 156 rows, 152 columns, 1226 nonzeros
Presolved model has 3 bilinear constraint(s)

Solving non-convex MIQCP to global optimality

Variable types: 107 continuous, 45 integer (45 binary)

Root relaxation: objective -6.478366e+01, 173 iterations, 0.00 seconds (0.00 work units)

    Nodes    |    Current Node    |     Objective Bounds      |     Work
 Expl Unexpl |  Obj  Depth IntInf | Incumbent    BestBd   Gap | It/Node Time

     0     0  -64.78366    0   32          -  -64.78366      -     -    0s
H    0     0                      -2.2764643  -64.78366  2746%     -    0s
     0     0  -55.86325    0   37   -2.27646  -55.86325  2354%     -    0s
     0     0  -55.77090    0   35   -2.27646  -55.77090  2350%     -    0s
     0     0  -55.50872    0   35   -2.27646  -55.50872  2338%     -    0s
     0     0  -51.50474    0   40   -2.27646  -51.50474  2162%     -    0s
H    0     0                      -2.2764643  -51.48715  2162%     -    0s
     0     0  -50.87925    0   40   -2.27646  -50.87925  2135%     -    0s
     0     0  -50.08858    0   41   -2.27646  -50.08858  2100%     -    0s
     0     0  -50.01895    0   40   -2.27646  -50.01895  2097%     -    0s
     0     0  -49.69437    0   39   -2.27646  -49.69437  2083%     -    0s
     0     0  -49.31372    0   39   -2.27646  -49.31372  2066%     -    0s
     0     0  -48.86590    0   40   -2.27646  -48.86590  2047%     -    0s
     0     0  -48.86274    0   40   -2.27646  -48.86274  2046%     -    0s
     0     0  -48.64730    0   42   -2.27646  -48.64730  2037%     -    0s
     0     0  -47.74046    0   42   -2.27646  -47.74046  1997%     -    0s
     0     0  -47.21602    0   43   -2.27646  -47.21602  1974%     -    0s
     0     0  -46.60300    0   43   -2.27646  -46.60300  1947%     -    0s
     0     0  -46.27456    0   41   -2.27646  -46.27456  1933%     -    0s
     0     0  -45.88200    0   39   -2.27646  -45.88200  1915%     -    0s
     0     0  -45.62065    0   41   -2.27646  -45.62065  1904%     -    0s
     0     0  -45.33830    0   41   -2.27646  -45.33830  1892%     -    0s
     0     0  -45.29625    0   42   -2.27646  -45.29625  1890%     -    0s
     0     0  -45.17350    0   42   -2.27646  -45.17350  1884%     -    0s
     0     0  -45.17023    0   41   -2.27646  -45.17023  1884%     -    0s
     0     0  -45.04846    0   42   -2.27646  -45.04846  1879%     -    0s
     0     0  -45.04846    0   42   -2.27646  -45.04846  1879%     -    0s
     0     0  -45.04846    0   42   -2.27646  -45.04846  1879%     -    0s
     0     2  -45.02140    0   42   -2.27646  -45.02140  1878%     -    0s
*  553   379              35      -2.5104819  -32.36381  1189%  20.3    0s
*  569   385              43      -2.8089372  -32.36381  1052%  19.8    0s
*  571   378              44      -2.8179327  -32.36381  1048%  19.8    0s
*  573   370              45      -2.8192664  -32.36381  1048%  19.7    0s
H  637   398                      -2.8192665  -31.29965  1010%  18.8    0s
H  658   392                      -2.8192666  -29.09306   932%  20.6    1s
H  661   374                      -2.8192668  -29.09306   932%  20.6    1s
H  717   370                      -6.5467087  -29.09306   344%  20.3    1s
H  718   352                      -6.5467087  -29.09306   344%  20.3    1s
*  741   327              56      -6.5467094  -29.09306   344%  19.7    1s
*  742   309              56      -6.5467105  -29.09306   344%  19.7    1s
H 1470   377                      -6.5467106  -20.20589   209%  21.2    1s
  6752   527   -8.18432   24   28   -6.54671  -11.27458  72.2%  20.6    5s

Cutting planes:
  Gomory: 8
  Implied bound: 23
  MIR: 102
  Flow cover: 82
  Relax-and-lift: 4

Explored 8490 nodes (171242 simplex iterations) in 6.07 seconds (6.74 work units)
Thread count was 2 (of 2 available processors)

Solution count 9: -6.54671 -6.54671 -6.54671 ... -2.27646

Optimal solution found (tolerance 1.00e-01)
Best objective -6.546710580283e+00, best bound -7.180846767589e+00, gap 9.6863%

After solving the model, we check the error in the estimate of the Gurobi solution.

print(
    "Maximum error in approximating the regression {:.6}".format(
        np.max(pred_constr.get_error())
    )
)
Maximum error in approximating the regression 2.40364e-06

Finally, we look at the solution and the objective value found.

print(
    f"solution point of the approximated problem ({x[0].X:.4}, {x[1].X:.4}), "
    + f"objective value {m.ObjVal}."
)
print(
    f"Function value at the solution point {peak2d(x[0].X, x[1].X)} error {abs(peak2d(x[0].X, x[1].X) - m.ObjVal)}."
)
solution point of the approximated problem (0.2023, -1.598), objective value -6.54671058028288.
Function value at the solution point -6.530935821778893 error 0.01577475850398713.

The difference between the function and the approximation at the computed solution point is noticeable, but the point we found is reasonably close to the actual global minimum. Depending on the use case this might be deemed acceptable. Of course, training a larger network should result in a better approximation.

Copyright © 2023-2026 Gurobi Optimization, LLC

Total running time of the script: (0 minutes 13.886 seconds)

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