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Automatic heuristic generation with genetic programming: evolving a jack-of-all-trades or a master of one

Published: 07 July 2007 Publication History

Abstract

It is possible to argue that online bin packing heuristics should be evaluated by using metrics based on their performance over the set of all bin packing problems, such as the worst case or average case performance. However, this method of assessing a heuristic would only be relevant to a user who employs the heuristic over a set of problems which is actually representative of the set of all possible bin packing problems. On the other hand, a real world user will often only deal with packing problems that are representative of a particular sub-set. Their piece sizes will all belong to a particular distribution. The contribution of this paper is to show that a Genetic Programming system can automate the process of heuristic generation and produce heuristics that are human-competitive over a range of sets of problems, or which excel on a particular sub-set. We also show that the choice of training instances is vital in the area of automatic heuristic generation, due to the trade-off between the performance and generality of the heuristics generated and their applicability to new problems.

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  1. Automatic heuristic generation with genetic programming: evolving a jack-of-all-trades or a master of one

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    GECCO '07: Proceedings of the 9th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
    July 2007
    2313 pages
    ISBN:9781595936974
    DOI:10.1145/1276958
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    Published: 07 July 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. bin packing
    2. genetic programming
    3. heuristics
    4. hyper heuristics

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    GECCO '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 266 of 577 submissions, 46%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

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    • (2024)Generative Hyper-heuristicsProceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion10.1145/3638530.3648417(1069-1095)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2024
    • (2023)Generative Hyper-heuristicsProceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation10.1145/3583133.3595033(1069-1098)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Mathematical discoveries from program search with large language modelsNature10.1038/s41586-023-06924-6625:7995(468-475)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2023
    • (2022)Neuroevolution for Parameter Adaptation in Differential EvolutionAlgorithms10.3390/a1504012215:4(122)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
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    • (2022)A Parameter-Based Analysis of Ant-Based Generation Hyper-Heuristics2022 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI)10.1109/SSCI51031.2022.10022101(812-819)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2022
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