Identifying Hyper-Heuristic Trends through a Text Mining Approach on the Current Literature

Abstract

Hyper-heuristics have arisen as methods that increase the generality of existing solvers. They have proven helpful for dealing with complex problems, particularly those related to combinatorial optimization. Their recent growth in popularity has increased the daily amount of text in the related literature. This information is primarily unstructured, mainly text that traditional computer data systems cannot process. Traditional systematic literature review studies exhibit multiple limitations, including high time consumption, lack of replicability, and subjectivity of the results. For this reason, text mining has become essential for researchers in recent years. Therefore, efficient text mining techniques are needed to extract meaningful information, patterns, and relationships. This study adopts a literature review of 963 journal and conference papers on hyper-heuristic-related works. We first describe the essential text mining techniques, including text preprocessing, word clouds, clustering, and frequent association rule learning in hyper-heuristic publications. With that information, we implement visualization tools to understand the most frequent relations and topics in the hyper-heuristic domain. The main findings highlight the most dominant topics in the literature. We use text mining analysis to find widespread manifestations, representing the significance of the different areas of hyper-heuristics. Furthermore, we apply clustering to provide seven categories showing the associations between the topics related to hyper-heuristic literature. The vast amount of data available that we find opens up a new opportunity for researchers to analyze the status of hyper-heuristics and help create strategic plans regarding the scope of hyper-heuristics. Lastly, we remark that future work will address the limitations of collecting information from multiple data sources and analyze book chapters related to hyper-heuristics.