Regression Machine Learning Models for the Short-Time Prediction of Genetic Algorithm Results in a Vehicle Routing Problem

Machine learning techniques have advanced rapidly, leading to better prediction accuracy within a short computational time. Such advancement encourages various novel applications, including in the field of operations research. This study introduces a novel way to utilize regression machine learning models to predict the objectives of vehicle routing problems that are solved using a genetic algorithm. Previous studies have generally discussed how (1) operations research methods are used independently to generate optimized solutions and (2) machine learning techniques are used independently to predict values from a given dataset. Some studies have discussed the collaborations between operations research and machine learning fields as follows: (1) using machine learning techniques to generate input data for operations research problems, (2) using operations research techniques to optimize the hyper-parameters of machine learning models, and (3) using machine learning to improve the quality of operations research algorithms. This study differs from the types of collaborative studies listed above. This study focuses on the prediction of the objective of the vehicle routing problem directly given the input and output data, without optimizing the problem using operations research algorithms. This study introduces a straightforward framework that captures the input data characteristics for the vehicle routing problem. The proposed framework is applied by generating the input and output data using the genetic algorithm and then using regression machine learning models to predict the obtained objective values. The numerical experiments show that the best models are random forest regression, a generalized linear model with a Poisson distribution, and ridge regression with cross-validation.