Weighted Elastic Net Penalized Mean-Variance Portfolio Design and Computation

It is well known that the out-of-sample performance of Markowitz's mean-variance portfolio criterion can be negatively affected by estimation errors in the mean and covariance. In this paper we address the problem by regularizing the mean-variance objective function with a weighted elastic net penalty. We show that the use of this penalty can be motivated by a robust reformulation of the mean-variance criterion that directly accounts for parameter uncertainty. With this interpretation of the wei...