Machine Learning for Big Data Analysis

A metaheuristic is a higher-level procedure designed to select a heuristic (partial search algorithm) that may lead to a sufficiently good solution to an optimization problem, especially with incomplete or imperfect information. The basic principle of metaheuristics is to sample a set of solutions which is large enough to be completely sampled. As metaheuristics make few assumptions about the optimization problem to be solved, they may be put to use in a variety of problems. Metaheuristics do not however, guarantee that a globally optimal solution can be found on some class of problems since most of them implement some form of stochastic optimization. Hence the solution found is often dependent on the set of random variables generated. By searching over a large set of feasible solutions, metaheuristics can often find good solutions with less computational effort than optimization algorithms, iterative methods, or simple heuristics. As such, they are useful approaches for optimization problems.