17,789 research outputs found
An Enhanced Features Extractor for a Portfolio of Constraint Solvers
Recent research has shown that a single arbitrarily efficient solver can be
significantly outperformed by a portfolio of possibly slower on-average
solvers. The solver selection is usually done by means of (un)supervised
learning techniques which exploit features extracted from the problem
specification. In this paper we present an useful and flexible framework that
is able to extract an extensive set of features from a Constraint
(Satisfaction/Optimization) Problem defined in possibly different modeling
languages: MiniZinc, FlatZinc or XCSP. We also report some empirical results
showing that the performances that can be obtained using these features are
effective and competitive with state of the art CSP portfolio techniques
Minimizing energy below the glass thresholds
Focusing on the optimization version of the random K-satisfiability problem,
the MAX-K-SAT problem, we study the performance of the finite energy version of
the Survey Propagation (SP) algorithm. We show that a simple (linear time)
backtrack decimation strategy is sufficient to reach configurations well below
the lower bound for the dynamic threshold energy and very close to the analytic
prediction for the optimal ground states. A comparative numerical study on one
of the most efficient local search procedures is also given.Comment: 12 pages, submitted to Phys. Rev. E, accepted for publicatio
Generalizing backdoors
Abstract. A powerful intuition in the design of search methods is that one wants to proactively select variables that simplify the problem instance as much as possible when these variables are assigned values. The notion of “Backdoor ” variables follows this intuition. In this work we generalize Backdoors in such a way to allow more general classes of sub-solvers, both complete and heuristic. In order to do so, Pseudo-Backdoors and Heuristic-Backdoors are formally introduced and then applied firstly to a simple Multiple Knapsack Problem and secondly to a complex combinatorial optimization problem in the area of stochastic inventory control. Our preliminary computational experience shows the effectiveness of these approaches that are able to produce very low run times and — in the case of Heuristic-Backdoors — high quality solutions by employing very simple heuristic rules such as greedy local search strategies.
Indexing Metric Spaces for Exact Similarity Search
With the continued digitalization of societal processes, we are seeing an
explosion in available data. This is referred to as big data. In a research
setting, three aspects of the data are often viewed as the main sources of
challenges when attempting to enable value creation from big data: volume,
velocity and variety. Many studies address volume or velocity, while much fewer
studies concern the variety. Metric space is ideal for addressing variety
because it can accommodate any type of data as long as its associated distance
notion satisfies the triangle inequality. To accelerate search in metric space,
a collection of indexing techniques for metric data have been proposed.
However, existing surveys each offers only a narrow coverage, and no
comprehensive empirical study of those techniques exists. We offer a survey of
all the existing metric indexes that can support exact similarity search, by i)
summarizing all the existing partitioning, pruning and validation techniques
used for metric indexes, ii) providing the time and storage complexity analysis
on the index construction, and iii) report on a comprehensive empirical
comparison of their similarity query processing performance. Here, empirical
comparisons are used to evaluate the index performance during search as it is
hard to see the complexity analysis differences on the similarity query
processing and the query performance depends on the pruning and validation
abilities related to the data distribution. This article aims at revealing
different strengths and weaknesses of different indexing techniques in order to
offer guidance on selecting an appropriate indexing technique for a given
setting, and directing the future research for metric indexes
- …