Jonas Mockus ... 322 pages - Publisher: Springer; (November, 2013) ... Language: English - ISBN-10: 1461371147 - ISBN-13: 978-1461371144
This book shows how the Bayesian Approach (BA) improves well known
heuristics by randomizing and optimizing their parameters. That is the
Bayesian Heuristic Approach (BHA). The ten in-depth examples are
designed to teach Operations Research using Internet. Each example is a
simple representation of some impor tant family of real-life problems.
The accompanying software can be run by remote Internet users. The
supporting web-sites include software for Java, C++, and other lan
guages. A theoretical setting is described in which one can discuss a
Bayesian adaptive choice of heuristics for discrete and global
optimization prob lems. The techniques are evaluated in the spirit of
the average rather than the worst case analysis. In this context,
"heuristics" are understood to be an expert opinion defining how to
solve a family of problems of discrete or global optimization. The
term "Bayesian Heuristic Approach" means that one defines a set of
heuristics and fixes some prior distribu tion on the results obtained.
By applying BHA one is looking for the heuristic that reduces the
average deviation from the global optimum. The theoretical discussions
serve as an introduction to examples that are the main part of the book.
All the examples are interconnected. Dif ferent examples illustrate
different points of the general subject. How ever, one can consider
each example separately, too.