scholarly journals Experimental Matching of Instances to Heuristics for Constraint Satisfaction Problems

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Humberto Moreno-Scott ◽  
José Carlos Ortiz-Bayliss ◽  
Hugo Terashima-Marín ◽  
Santiago Enrique Conant-Pablos

Constraint satisfaction problems are of special interest for the artificial intelligence and operations research community due to their many applications. Although heuristics involved in solving these problems have largely been studied in the past, little is known about the relation between instances and the respective performance of the heuristics used to solve them. This paper focuses on both the exploration of the instance space to identify relations between instances and good performing heuristics and how to use such relations to improve the search. Firstly, the document describes a methodology to explore the instance space of constraint satisfaction problems and evaluate the corresponding performance of six variable ordering heuristics for such instances in order to find regions on the instance space where some heuristics outperform the others. Analyzing such regions favors the understanding of how these heuristics work and contribute to their improvement. Secondly, we use the information gathered from the first stage to predict the most suitable heuristic to use according to the features of the instance currently being solved. This approach proved to be competitive when compared against the heuristics applied in isolation on both randomly generated and structured instances of constraint satisfaction problems.

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
José Carlos Ortiz-Bayliss ◽  
Ivan Amaya ◽  
Santiago Enrique Conant-Pablos ◽  
Hugo Terashima-Marín

When solving constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), it is a common practice to rely on heuristics to decide which variable should be instantiated at each stage of the search. But, this ordering influences the search cost. Even so, and to the best of our knowledge, no earlier work has dealt with how first variable orderings affect the overall cost. In this paper, we explore the cost of finding high-quality orderings of variables within constraint satisfaction problems. We also study differences among the orderings produced by some commonly used heuristics and the way bad first decisions affect the search cost. One of the most important findings of this work confirms the paramount importance of first decisions. Another one is the evidence that many of the existing variable ordering heuristics fail to appropriately select the first variable to instantiate. Another one is the evidence that many of the existing variable ordering heuristics fail to appropriately select the first variable to instantiate. We propose a simple method to improve early decisions of heuristics. By using it, performance of heuristics increases.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongbo Li ◽  
Yanchun Liang ◽  
Ning Zhang ◽  
Jinsong Guo ◽  
Dong Xu ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (63) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
James L. Cox ◽  
Stephen Lucci ◽  
Tayfun Pay

We carry out a detailed analysis of the effects of different dynamic variable and value ordering heuristics on the search space of Sudoku when the encoding method and the filtering algorithm are fixed. Our study starts by examining lexicographical variable and value ordering and evaluates different combinations of dynamic variable and value ordering heuristics. We eventually build up to a dynamic variable ordering heuristic that has two rounds of tie-breakers, where the second tie-breaker is a dynamic value ordering heuristic. We show that our method that uses this interlinked heuristic outperforms the previously studied ones with the same experimental setup. Overall, we conclude that constructing insightful dynamic variable ordering heuristics that also utilize a dynamic value ordering heuristic in their decision making process could drastically improve the search effort for some constraint satisfaction problems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (18) ◽  
pp. 6553
Author(s):  
Sabrina Azzi ◽  
Stéphane Gagnon ◽  
Alex Ramirez ◽  
Gregory Richards

Healthcare is considered as one of the most promising application areas for artificial intelligence and analytics (AIA) just after the emergence of the latter. AI combined to analytics technologies is increasingly changing medical practice and healthcare in an impressive way using efficient algorithms from various branches of information technology (IT). Indeed, numerous works are published every year in several universities and innovation centers worldwide, but there are concerns about progress in their effective success. There are growing examples of AIA being implemented in healthcare with promising results. This review paper summarizes the past 5 years of healthcare applications of AIA, across different techniques and medical specialties, and discusses the current issues and challenges, related to this revolutionary technology. A total of 24,782 articles were identified. The aim of this paper is to provide the research community with the necessary background to push this field even further and propose a framework that will help integrate diverse AIA technologies around patient needs in various healthcare contexts, especially for chronic care patients, who present the most complex comorbidities and care needs.


This chapter describes NTA capabilities in modeling various kinds of intelligence systems, namely discrete automata, systems for Formal Concept Analysis and for solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems, as well as for unified representation and processing of knowledge expressed in different conventional structures: productions, semantic networks, frames, etc.


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