Koopman analysis of combinatorial optimization problems with replica exchange Monte Carlo method

Abstract

Combinatorial optimization problems play crucial roles in real-world applications, and many studies from a physics perspective have contributed to specialized hardware for high-speed computation. However, some combinatorial optimization problems are easy to solve, and others are not. Hence, the qualification of the difficulty in problem-solving will be beneficial. In this paper, we employ the Koopman analysis for multiple time-series data from the replica exchange Monte Carlo method. After proposing a quantity that aggregates the information of the multiple time-series data, we performed numerical experiments. The results indicate a negative correlation between the proposed quantity and the ability of the solution search.