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Register a new userEnhancing Selection Hyper-heuristics via Feature Transformations
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Added by
Ivan Amaya
Publication date
2018
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Hyper-heuristics are a novel tool. They deal with complex optimization problems where standalone solvers exhibit varied performance. Among such a tool reside selection hyper-heuristics. By combining the strengths of each solver, this kind of hyper-heuristic offers a more robust tool. However, their effectiveness is highly dependent on the features used to link them with the problem that is being solved. Aiming at enhancing selection hyper-heuristics, in this paper we propose two types of transformation: explicit and implicit. The first one directly changes the distribution of critical points within the feature domain while using a Euclidean distance to measure proximity. The second one operates indirectly by preserving the distribution of critical points but changing the distance metric through a kernel function. We focus on analyzing the effect of each kind of transformation, and of their combinations. We test our ideas in the domain of constraint satisfaction problems because of their popularity and many practical applications. In this work, we compare the performance of our proposals against those of previously published data. Furthermore, we expand on previous research by increasing the number of analyzed features. We found that, by incorporating transformations into the model of selection hyper-heuristics, overall performance can be improved, yielding more stable results. However, combining implicit and explicit transformations was not as fruitful. Additionally, we ran some confirmatory tests on the domain of knapsack problems. Again, we observed improved stability, leading to the generation of hyper-heuristics whose profit had a standard deviation between 20% and 30% smaller.
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SUNNY is an Algorithm Selection (AS) technique originally tailored for Constraint Programming (CP). SUNNY enables to schedule, from a portfolio of solvers, a subset of solvers to be run on a given CP problem. This approach has proved to be effective for CP problems, and its parallel version won many gold medals in the Open category of the MiniZinc Challenge -- the yearly international competition for CP solvers. In 2015, the ASlib benchmarks were released for comparing AS systems coming from disparate fields (e.g., ASP, QBF, and SAT) and SUNNY was extended to deal with generic AS problems. This led to the development of sunny-as2, an algorithm selector based on SUNNY for ASlib scenarios. A preliminary version of sunny-as2 was submitted to the Open Algorithm Selection Challenge (OASC) in 2017, where it turned out to be the best approach for the runtime minimization of decision problems. In this work, we present the technical advancements of sunny-as2, including: (i) wrapper-based feature selection; (ii) a training approach combining feature selection and neighbourhood size configuration; (iii) the application of nested cross-validation. We show how sunny-as2 performance varies depending on the considered AS scenarios, and we discuss its strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we also show how sunny-as2 improves on its preliminary version submitted to OASC.
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Feature selection (FS) is an important research topic in machine learning. Usually, FS is modelled as a+ bi-objective optimization problem whose objectives are: 1) classification accuracy; 2) number of features. One of the main issues in real-world applications is missing data. Databases with missing data are likely to be unreliable. Thus, FS performed on a data set missing some data is also unreliable. In order to directly control this issue plaguing the field, we propose in this study a novel modelling of FS: we include reliability as the third objective of the problem. In order to address the modified problem, we propose the application of the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-III (NSGA-III). We selected six incomplete data sets from the University of California Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository. We used the mean imputation method to deal with the missing data. In the experiments, k-nearest neighbors (K-NN) is used as the classifier to evaluate the feature subsets. Experimental results show that the proposed three-objective model coupled with NSGA-III efficiently addresses the FS problem for the six data sets included in this study.
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