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Inconsistency versus Accuracy of Heuristics

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Advances in Artificial Intelligence (Canadian AI 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8436))

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Abstract

Many studies in heuristic search suggest that the accuracy of the heuristic used has a positive impact on improving the performance of the search. In another direction, historical research perceives that the performance of heuristic search algorithms, such as A* and IDA*, can be improved by requiring the heuristics to be consistent – a property satisfied by any perfect heuristic. However, a few recent studies show that inconsistent heuristics can also be used to achieve a large improvement in these heuristic search algorithms. These results raise a natural question: which property of heuristics, accuracy or consistency/inconsistency, should we focus on when building heuristics?

In this article, we investigate the relationship between the inconsistency and the accuracy of heuristics with A* search. Our analytical result reveals a correlation between these two properties. We then run experiments on the domain for the Knapsack problem with a family of practical heuristics. Our empirical results show that in many cases, the more accurate heuristics also have higher level of inconsistency and result in fewer node expansions by A*.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer & Information Sciences, Indiana University South Bend, USA

    Hang Dinh

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  1. Hang Dinh
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Medicine and School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Department of Epidemiology & Community Medicine, University of Ottawa, 451 Smyth Road, Room 3105, K1H 8M5, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Marina Sokolova

  2. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Peter van Beek

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Dinh, H. (2014). Inconsistency versus Accuracy of Heuristics. In: Sokolova, M., van Beek, P. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence. Canadian AI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8436. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06483-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06483-3_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06482-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06483-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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