Towards objective measures of algorithm performance across instance space

Abstract

This paper tackles the difficult but important task of objective algorithm performance assessment for optimization. Rather than reporting average performance of algorithms across a set of chosen instances, which may bias conclusions, we propose a methodology to enable the strengths and weaknesses of different optimization algorithms to be compared across a broader instance space. The results reported in a recent Computers and Operations Research paper comparing the performance of graph coloring heuristics are revisited with this new methodology to demonstrate (i) how pockets of the instance space can be found where algorithm performance varies significantly from the average performance of an..