Unsupervised Machine Learning for the Quadratic Assignment Problem

An unsupervised machine learning method based on association rule is studied for the Quadratic Assignment Problem. Parallel extraction of itemsets and local search algorithms are proposed. The extraction of frequent itemsets in the context of local search is shown to produce good results for a few problem instances. Negative results of the proposed learning mechanism are reported for other instances. This result contrasts with other hard optimization problems for which efficient learning processes are known in the context of local search.