Benchmarking in Optimization: Best Practice and Open Issues
It addresses the need for standardized benchmarking practices in optimization research, which is incremental as it synthesizes existing ideas into guidelines.
This survey compiles recommendations from researchers to promote best practices in benchmarking optimization algorithms, focusing on eight essential topics like clear goals and reproducibility, with the goal of providing guidelines for authors and reviewers.
This survey compiles ideas and recommendations from more than a dozen researchers with different backgrounds and from different institutes around the world. Promoting best practice in benchmarking is its main goal. The article discusses eight essential topics in benchmarking: clearly stated goals, well-specified problems, suitable algorithms, adequate performance measures, thoughtful analysis, effective and efficient designs, comprehensible presentations, and guaranteed reproducibility. The final goal is to provide well-accepted guidelines (rules) that might be useful for authors and reviewers. As benchmarking in optimization is an active and evolving field of research this manuscript is meant to co-evolve over time by means of periodic updates.