Clustering of Hyper-heuristic Selections using the Smith-Waterman Algorithm for Off line Learning

Selection hyper-heuristics are methods that are typically used to solve computationally hard optimisation problems (see [1]). A selection hyper-heuristic selects heuristics from a given set of low level heuristics, deciding which heuristic to apply at a given point during the optimisation process. e sequences of low level heuristic selections and objective function values that result from the application of a simple selection hyper-heuristic to the HyFlex problem set (see [3]) are used to construct an offline learning database. The intention is to select effective subsequences of heuristics from this database and use them as inputs to machine learning algorithms in order to improve optimisation. The purpose of this study is to algorithmically identify and analyse the similarities and dissimilarities that occur between the sequences of the database. By employing a suitable measure of similarity, the sequences of the offline database can be grouped or clustered according to the view of the similarity algorithm. It can be shown that by using a well-known algorithm from bioinformatics more commonly used to explore the conserved regions of DNA sequences, the Smith-Waterman algorithm (see [4]), it is possible to characterise problems using only the sequence of heuristic choices made by the hyper-heuristic. The Smith-Waterman algorithm is able to provide a measure of the level of similarity between two strings operating over any alphabet, and is used here to de fine a distance function between sequences of heuristics which is then used to perform a cluster analysis. e results presented here show that the Smith-Waterman algorithm is able separate the offline database into distinct problem domains. [...]