In “Algorithm Portfolio Design: Theory vs. Practice“, Gomes and Selman (2013) study the use of a portfolio of stochastic search algorithm to solve computationally hard search problems. Here are some interesting quotes from the paper:
“Our studies reveal that in many cases the performance of a single algorithm dominates all others, on the problem class under consideration.”
“Given the diversity in performance profiles among algorithms, various approaches have been developed to combine different algorithms to take into account the computational resource constraints and to optimize the overall performance. These considerations led to the development of anytime algorithms (Dean and Boddy 1988), decision theoretic metareasoning and related approaches (Horvitz and Zilberstein 1996; Russell and Norvig 1995), and algorithm portfolio design (Huberman et al. 1997).”
“In addition, we also show that a good strategy for designing a portfolio is to combine many short runs of the same algorithm. The effectiveness of such portfolios explains the common practice of “restarts” for stochastic procedures, where the same algorithm is run repeatedly with different initial seeds for the random number generator. (For related work on the effectiveness of restarts, see e.g., Aldous and Vazirani 1994; Ertel 1991; Selman and Kirkpatrick 1996.)”