What is an Ant colony optimization algorithm?

What are all the known applications of the ant colony optimization techniques?

  • All I have come across is TSP. Are there other interesting applications with explanations?

  • Answer:

    Marco Dorigo (the inventor of the algorithm) and his collegues started a company to exploit AntColony. One project was: optimizing MIGROS  supermarket truck fleet routes. But at the end of the day, in this and  other in real world examples: heuristics plays a more fundamental role in problem solving than Ant colony itself.

Jose Berengueres at Quora Visit the source

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ACO is supposed to be a swarm intelligence based learning algorithm which has been widely used for various optimisation problems.From a data mining stand point, its one of the best performing evolutionary algorithms in the domain of feature selection and rule mining. In fact Parpinelli et al used ACO to extract and mine simpler rules in the form of "If<con1>&<con2>&....&<condn> then predicted_label is X" from raw datasets.One can check out a package called myra available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/myra/ to explore rule mining on datasets using ACO.Some papers related to the description of AntMiner(ACO based rule miner) are "Data Mining with an Ant Colony Optimisation Algorithm by Parpinelli et al","Classification with Ant Colony Optimisation by Martens et al". A useful site may be http://www.antminerplus.com/ where one can find ACO applied to some interesting problems(Credit Risk Management,inferring business rules etc.) A lot of authors have explored the use of ACO in bioinformatics.Hybrid ACO algorithms have been reported of giving high classification accuracies for massive bioinformatics optimisation problems(Models for Cancer Classification etc).

Shameek Ghosh

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