Simple and Population Local Search Approaches for Portfolio Design Problem

This chapter introduces a local search optimization technique for solving efficiently a ðnancial portfolio design problem that consists of assigning assets to portfolios, allowing a compromise between maximizing gains, and minimizing losses. This practical problem appears usually in ðnancial engineering, such as in the design of CDO-squared portfolios. This problem has been modeled by Flener et al., who proposed an exact method to solve it. It can be formulated as a quadratic program on the (0,1) domain. It is well known that exact solving approaches on difficult and large instances of quadratic integer programs are known inefficient. That is why the authors have adopted local search methods, namely simple local search and population local search. They propose neighborhood and evaluation functions specialized on this problem. To boost the local search process, they propose also a greedy algorithm to start the search with an optimized initial configuration. Experimental results on non-trivial instances of the problem show the effectiveness of the incomplete approach.