F-race and iterated F-race: An overview

Algorithms for solving hard optimization problems typically have several parameters that need to be set appropriately such that some aspect of performance is optimized. In this chapter, we review F-Race, a racing algorithm for the task of automatic algorithm configuration. F-Race is based on a statistical approach for selecting the best configuration out of a set of candidate configurations under stochastic evaluations. We review the ideas underlying this technique and discuss an extension of the initial F-Race algorithm, which leads to a family of algorithms that we call iterated F-Race. Experimental results comparing one specific implementation of iterated F-Race to the original F-Race algorithm confirm the potential of this family of algorithms.