Cross-disciplinary perspectives on meta-learning for algorithm selection

Abstract

The algorithm selection problem [Rice 1976] seeks to answer the question: Which algorithm is likely to perform best for my problem? Recognizing the problem as a learning task in the early 1990's, the machine learning community has developed the field of meta-learning, focused on learning about learning algorithm performance on classification problems. But there has been only limited generalization of these ideas beyond classification, and many related attempts have been made in other disciplines (such as AI and operations research) to tackle the algorithm selection problem in different ways, introducing different terminology, and overlooking the similarities of approaches. In this sense, the..