On the potential of normalized TSP features for automated algorithm selection

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Classic automated algorithm selection (AS) for (combinatorial) optimization problems heavily relies on so-called instance features, i.e., numerical characteristics of the problem at hand ideally extracted with computationally low-demanding routines. For the traveling salesperson problem (TSP) a plethora of features have been suggested. Most of these features are, if at all, only normalized imprecisely raising the issue of feature values being strongly affected by the instance size. Such artifacts may have detrimental effects on algorithm selection models. We propose a normalization for two feature groups which stood out in multiple AS studies on the TSP: (a) features based on a minimum spanning tree (MST) and (b) a k-nearest neighbor graph (NNG) transformation of the input instance. To this end we theoretically derive minimum and maximum values for properties of MSTs and k-NNGs of Euclidean graphs. We analyze the differences in feature space between normalized versions of these features and their unnormalized counterparts. Our empirical investigations on various TSP benchmark sets point out that the feature scaling succeeds in eliminating the effect of the instance size. Eventually, a proof-of-concept AS-study shows promising results: models trained with normalized features tend to outperform those trained with the respective vanilla features.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFOGA 2021 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM/SIGEVO Conference on Foundations of Genetic Algorithms
Publication statusPublished - 6 Sept 2021
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85114951700
ORCID /0000-0002-3571-667X/work/142236654
Mendeley 6e394774-7a01-392f-81ba-7838a995b29a

Keywords

Keywords

  • automated algorithm selection, graph theory, instance features, normalization, traveling salesperson problem (TSP)