Treffer: Hybrid evolutionary algorithms on minimum vertex cover for random graphs

This paper analyzes the hierarchical Bayesian optimization algorithm (hBOA) on minimum vertex cover for standard classes of random graphs and transformed SAT instances. The performance of hBOA is compared with that of the branch-and-bound problem solver (BB), the simple genetic algorithm (GA) and the parallel simulated annealing (PSA). The results indicate that BB is significantly outperformed by all the other tested methods, which is expected as BB is a complete search algorithm and minimum vertex cover is an NP-complete problem. The best performance is achieved with hBOA; nonetheless, the performance differences between hBOA and other evolutionary algorithms are relatively small, indicating that mutation-based search and recombination-based search lead to similar performance on the tested problem instances.