A Novel Feature-Based Approach to Characterize Algorithm Performance for the Traveling Salesperson Problem - Mersmann, Olaf; Bischl, Bernd; Trautmann, Heike; Wagner, Markus; Bossek, Jakob; Neumann, Frank (Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 2013)
Meta-heuristics are frequently used to tackle NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. With this paper we contribute to the understanding of the success of 2-opt based local search algorithms for solving the traveling salesperson problem (TSP). Although 2-opt is widely used in practice, it is hard to understand its success from a theoretical perspective. We take a statistical approach and examine the features of TSP instances that make the problem either hard or easy to solve. As a measure of problem difficulty for 2-opt we use the approximation ratio that it achieves on a given instance. Our investigations point out important features that make TSP instances hard or easy to be approximated by 2-opt.
Keywords: article; 2-opt -- 90B06 -- Classification -- Feature selection -- MARS -- TSP