Determining the difficulty of landscapes by PageRank centrality in local optima networks

Abstract

The contribution of this study is twofold: First, we show that we can predict the performance of Iterated Local Search (ILS) in different landscapes with the help of Local Optima Networks (LONs) with escape edges. As a predictor, we use the PageRank Centrality of the global optimum. Escape edges can be extracted with lower effort than the edges used in a previous study. Second, we show that the PageRank vector of a LON can be used to predict the solution quality (average fitness) achievable by ILS in different landscapes.