Meta-analysis of metaheuristics: Quantifying the effect of adaptiveness in adaptive large neighborhood search
Renata Turkeš, Kenneth Sörensen, Lars Magnus Hvattum, Eva Barrena, Hayet Chentli, Leandro dos Santos Coelho, Iman Dayarian, Axel Grimault, Anders Gullhave, Çağatay Iris, Merve Keskin, Alexander Kiefer, Richard Martin Lusby, Geraldo Regis Mauri, Marcela Monroy‐Licht, Sophie N. Parragh, Juan‐Pablo Riquelme‐Rodríguez, Alberto Santini, Vínicius Gandra Martins Santos, C. B. Thomas · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2019
Research on metaheuristics has focused on (novel) algorithmic development and on competitive testing, both of which have been frequently argued to yield little generalizable knowledge. The main goal of this paper is to promote meta-analysis — a systematic statistical examination that combines the results of several independent studies — as a more suitable way to obtain problem- and implementation-independent insights on metaheuristics. Meta-analysis is widely used in several scientific domains, most notably the medical sciences (e.g., to establish the efficacy of a certain treatment). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first meta-analysis in the field of metaheuristics.