Learning the Empirical Hardness of Optimization Problems: The Case of Combinatorial Auctions

  • Authors:
  • Kevin Leyton-Brown;Eugene Nudelman;Yoav Shoham

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • CP '02 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We propose a new approach for understanding the algorithm-specific empiricalh ardness of NP-Hard problems. In this work we focus on the empirical hardness of the winner determination problem--an optimization problem arising in combinatorial auctions--when solved by ILOG's CPLEX software. We consider nine widely-used problem distributions and sample randomly from a continuum of parameter settings for each distribution. We identify a large number of distribution-nonspecific features of data instances and use statisticalregression techniques to learn, evaluate and interpret a function from these features to the predicted hardness of an instance.