Re^2: Average Price Algorithm

I have checked the Dominus book. The partitioning problem shown is solved recursively, but it's slightly different to this problem in that (with this problem) you only know the quality of the fit once the overall selection (for a bucket) is made. Often there is some blend of allocations which fit really well, but it's easy to miss those if you get too clever with the algorithm.

As for the measurement of fitness - I'm having trouble deciding, but I think the sum of the errors is reasonable. Certainly not the max error because that will most often occur for allocations which are very small (1,2 or 3).

With monks help, I think I'm starting to get a better handle on this problem - I have an idea for a new approach based on a combination of a heuristic and brute-force.

I work in an organisation which is (supposedly) stuffed full of smart people, but when I get stuck I always come to the monks first :)

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Re^3: Average Price Algorithm by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Jan 29, 2009 at 12:12 UTC
sum of absolute errors, I think, is what you mean. Otherwise your fitness function should always return 0 ;-) You may be better off using one of the statistical error calculations (Portal:Statistics). IIRC (and stats was not my strong suit 15+ years ago, so apply salt as necessary), some of the more complex (well, more complex than summation anyway) error functions would give "better" results. --MidLifeXis	[reply]

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Re^3: Average Price Algorithm
by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Jan 29, 2009 at 12:12 UTC

sum of absolute errors, I think, is what you mean. Otherwise your fitness function should always return 0 ;-)

You may be better off using one of the statistical error calculations (Portal:Statistics). IIRC (and stats was not my strong suit 15+ years ago, so apply salt as necessary), some of the more complex (well, more complex than summation anyway) error functions would give "better" results.

--MidLifeXis

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