A comparative study of the leading machine learning techniques and two new optimization algorithms

We present here a computational study comparing the performance of leading machine learning techniques to that of recently developed graph-based combinatorial optimization algorithms (SNC and KSNC). The surprising result of this study is that SNC and KSNC consistently show the best or close to best performance in terms of their F₁-scores, accuracy, and recall. Furthermore, the performance of SNC and KSNC is considerably more robust than that of the other algorithms; the others may perform well on average but tend to vary greatly across data sets. This demonstrates that combinatorial optimization techniques can be competitive as compared to state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. The code developed for SNC and KSNC is publicly available.