A Performance Analysis of Basin Hopping Compared to Established Metaheuristics for Global Optimization

During the last decades many metaheuristics for global numerical optimization have been proposed. Among them, Basin Hopping is very simple and straightforward to implement, although rarely used outside its original Physical Chemistry community. In this work, our aim is to compare Basin Hopping, and two population variants of it, with readily available implementations of the well known metaheuristics Differential Evolution, Particle Swarm Optimization, and Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy. We perform numerical experiments using the IOH profiler environment with the BBOB test function set and two difficult real-world problems. The experiments were carried out in two different but complementary ways: by measuring the performance under a fixed budget of function evaluations and by considering a fixed target value. The general conclusion is that Basin Hopping and its newly introduced population variant are almost as good as Covariance Matrix Adaptation on the synthetic benchmark functions and better than it on the two hard cluster energy minimization problems. Thus, the proposed analyses show that Basin Hopping can be considered a good candidate for global numerical optimization problems along with the more established metaheuristics, especially if one wants to obtain quick and reliable results on an unknown problem.

A Local Optima Network View of Real Function Fitness Landscapes

The local optima network model has proved useful in the past in connection with combinatorial optimization problems. Here we examine its extension to the real continuous function domain. Through a sampling process, the model builds a weighted directed graph which captures the function's minima basin structure and its interconnection and which can be easily manipulated with the help of complex networks metrics. We show that the model provides a complementary view of function spaces that is easier to analyze and visualize, especially at higher dimension. In particular, we show that function hardness as represented by algorithm performance, is strongly related to several graph properties of the corresponding local optima network, opening the way for a classification of problem difficulty according to the corresponding graph structure and with possible extensions in the design of better metaheuristic approaches.

Local Optima Networks: A New Model of Combinatorial Fitness Landscapes

This chapter overviews a recently introduced network-based model of combinatorial landscapes: Local Optima Networks (LON). The model compresses the information given by the whole search space into a smaller mathematical object that is a graph having as vertices the local optima and as edges the possible weighted transitions between them. Two definitions of edges have been proposed: basin-transition and escape-edges, which capture relevant topological features of the underlying search spaces. This network model brings a new set of metrics to characterize the structure of combinatorial landscapes, those associated with the science of complex networks. These metrics are described, and results are presented of local optima network extraction and analysis for two selected combinatorial landscapes: NK landscapes and the quadratic assignment problem. Network features are found to correlate with and even predict the performance of heuristic search algorithms operating on these problems.

Local Optima Networks, Landscape Autocorrelation and Heuristic Search Performance

Recent developments in fitness landscape analysis include the study of Local Optima Networks (LON) and applications of the Elementary Landscapes theory. This paper represents a first step at combining these two tools to explore their ability to forecast the performance of search algorithms. We base our analysis on the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) and conduct a large statistical study over 600 generated instances of different types. Our results reveal interesting links between the network measures, the autocorrelation measures and the performance of heuristic search algorithms.

Local optima networks and the performance of iterated local search

Local Optima Networks (LONs) have been recently proposed as an alternative model of combinatorial fitness landscapes. The model compresses the information given by the whole search space into a smaller mathematical object that is the graph having as vertices the local optima and as edges the possible weighted transitions between them. A new set of metrics can be derived from this model that capture the distribution and connectivity of the local optima in the underlying configuration space. This paper departs from the descriptive analysis of local optima networks, and actively studies the correlation between network features and the performance of a local search heuristic. The NK family of landscapes and the Iterated Local Search metaheuristic are considered. With a statistically-sound approach based on multiple linear regression, it is shown that some LONs' features strongly influence and can even partly predict the performance of a heuristic search algorithm. This study validates the expressive power of LONs as a model of combinatorial fitness landscapes.

Clustering of Local Optima in Combinatorial Fitness Landscapes

Using the recently proposed model of combinatorial landscapes: local optima networks, we study the distribution of local optima in two classes of instances of the quadratic assignment problem. Our results indicate that the two problem instance classes give rise to very different configuration spaces. For the so-called real-like class, the optima networks possess a clear modular structure, while the networks belonging to the class of random uniform instances are less well partitionable into clusters. We briefly discuss the consequences of the findings for heuristically searching the corresponding problem spaces.

First-improvement vs. Best-improvement Local Optima Networks of NK Landscapes

This paper extends a recently proposed model for combinatorial landscapes: Local Optima Networks (LON), to incorporate a first-improvement (greedy-ascent) hill-climbing algorithm, instead of a best-improvement (steepest-ascent) one, for the definition and extraction of the basins of attraction of the landscape optima. A statistical analysis comparing best and first improvement network models for a set of NK landscapes, is presented and discussed. Our results suggest structural differences between the two models with respect to both the network connectivity, and the nature of the basins of attraction. The impact of these differences in the behavior of search heuristics based on first and best improvement local search is thoroughly discussed.

Communities of Minima in Local Optima Networks of Combinatorial Spaces

In this work we present a new methodology to study the structure of the configuration spaces of hard combinatorial problems. It consists in building the network that has as nodes the locally optimal configurations and as edges the weighted oriented transitions between their basins of attraction. We apply the approach to the detection of communities in the optima networks produced by two different classes of instances of a hard combinatorial optimization problem: the quadratic assignment problem (QAP). We provide evidence indicating that the two problem instance classes give rise to very different configuration spaces. For the so-called real-like class, the networks possess a clear modular structure, while the optima networks belonging to the class of random uniform instances are less well partitionable into clusters. This is convincingly supported by using several statistical tests. Finally, we shortly discuss the consequences of the findings for heuristically searching the corresponding problem spaces.

Complex-network analysis of combinatorial spaces: The NK landscape case

We propose a network characterization of combinatorial fitness landscapes by adapting the notion of inherent networks proposed for energy surfaces. We use the well-known family of NK landscapes as an example. In our case the inherent network is the graph whose vertices represent the local maxima in the landscape, and the edges account for the transition probabilities between their corresponding basins of attraction. We exhaustively extracted such networks on representative NK landscape instances, and performed a statistical characterization of their properties. We found that most of these network properties are related to the search difficulty on the underlying NK landscapes with varying values of K.

NK landscapes difficulty and Negative Slope Coefficient: How Sampling Influences the Results

Negative Slope Coefficient is an indicator of problem hardness that has been introduced in 2004 and that has returned promising results on a large set of problems. It is based on the concept of fitness cloud and works by partitioning the cloud into a number of bins representing as many different regions of the fitness landscape. The measure is calculated by joining the bins centroids by segments and summing all their negative slopes. In this paper, for the first time, we point out a potential problem of the Negative Slope Coefficient: we study its value for different instances of the well known NK-landscapes and we show how this indicator is dramatically influenced by the minimum number of points contained into a bin. Successively, we formally justify this behavior of the Negative Slope Coefficient and we discuss pros and cons of this measure.