The irace Package: Iterated Race for Automatic Algorithm Configuration
Introduction
The irace package implements the iterated
racing procedure, which is an extension of the Iterated F-race
procedure. Its main purpose is to automatically configure optimization
algorithms by finding the most appropriate settings given a set of instances
of an optimization problem. It builds upon the race package by Birattari
and it is implemented in R.
Keywords: automatic configuration, offline tuning, parameter tuning, racing, F-race.
Relevant literature:
- [1]
- Manuel López-Ibáñez, Jérémie
Dubois-Lacoste, Leslie Pérez Cáceres, Thomas Stützle,
and Mauro Birattari. The irace package: Iterated
Racing for Automatic Algorithm Configuration. Operations
Research Perspectives, 3:43–58, 2016.
[ bibtex | doi: 10.1016/j.orp.2016.09.002 ] - [2]
- Manuel López-Ibáñez, Jérémie
Dubois-Lacoste, Thomas Stützle, and Mauro Birattari. The irace
package, Iterated Race for Automatic Algorithm Configuration.
Technical Report TR/IRIDIA/2011-004, IRIDIA, Université libre de
Bruxelles, Belgium, 2011.
[ bibtex | PDF ] - [3]
- Manuel López-Ibáñez. The irace software package: A
tutorial. COMEX Workshop on Practical Automatic Algorithm
Configuration, 2014.
[ workshop webpage | PDF ]
People
Maintainers: Manuel López-Ibáñez and Leslie Pérez Cáceres.
Contributors: Jérémie Dubois-Lacoste, Thomas Stützle, Mauro Birattari, Eric Yuan and Prasanna Balaprakash.
License
This software is Copyright (C) 2011-2016 Manuel López-Ibáñez and Jérémie Dubois-Lacoste.
This program is free software (software libre); you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please be aware that the fact that this program is released as Free Software does not excuse you from scientific propriety, which obligates you to give appropriate credit! If you write a scientific paper describing research that made substantive use of this program, it is your obligation as a scientist to (a) mention the fashion in which this software was used in the Methods section; (b) mention the algorithm in the References section. The appropriate citation is:
- Manuel López-Ibáñez,
Jérémie Dubois-Lacoste, Leslie Pérez Cáceres,
Thomas Stützle, and Mauro Birattari. The irace package: Iterated
Racing for Automatic Algorithm Configuration. Operations
Research Perspectives, 2016.
Moreover, as a personal note, we would appreciate if you would email
irace with citations of papers referencing
this work.
iridia.ulb.ac.be
The race package is Copyright (C) 2003 Mauro Birattari, used under the GPL.
Examples
| Scenario | Training instances | Testing instances | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACOTSP | 200 random euclidean TSP instances (2000 cities) | 200 random euclidean TSP instances (2000 cities) | This scenario requires to download and compile the
ACOTSP software. The irace configuration files required to set up this tuning
scenario are included in the package sources at
inst/examples/acotsp/. Once the package is installed, the
files can be found by invoking
file.path(system.file(package="irace"), "examples","acotsp")
within R. |
Download
NOTE: After installation, the package can be used from within R or as a command-line tool. See the README file for more information.
The software is provided as an R package available from CRAN. This means that it can be installed by invoking R:
$ R
> install.packages("irace")
Or it can also be installed by downloading the package and
invoking at the command-line:
$ R CMD INSTALL <package>
where <package> is one of the three versions
available: .tar.gz (Unix/BSD/GNU/Linux), .tgz
(MacOS X), or .zip (Windows).
See the README file in case you have troubles.
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Last modified: 4 August 2017