On confidence intervals for the number of local optima

Abstract

The number of local optima is an important indicator of optimization problem difficulty for local search algorithms. Here we will discuss some methods of finding the confidence intervals for this parameter in problems where the large cardinality of the search space does not allow exhaustive investigation of solutions. First results are reported that were obtained by using these methods for NK landscapes, and for the low autocorrelation binary sequence and vertex cover problems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.