Generic Consistency for Approximate Stochastic Programming and Statistical Problems

In stochastic programming, statistics, or econometrics, the aim is in general the optimization of a criterion function that depends on a decision variable $\theta$ and reads as an expectation with respect to a probability $\mathbb{P}$. When this function cannot be computed in closed form, it is customary to approximate it through an empirical mean function based on a random sample. On the other hand, several other methods have been proposed, such as quasi--Monte Carlo integration and numerical integration rules. In this paper, we propose a general approach for approximating such a function, in the sense of epigraphical convergence, using a sequence of functions of simpler type which can be expressed as expectations with respect to probability measures $\mathbb{P}_{n}$ that, in some sense, approximate $\mathbb{P}$. The main difference with the existing results lies in the fact that our main theorem does not impose conditions directly on the approximating probabilities but only on some integrals with respec...