Pareto front and Pareto optimal points as a measure of the algorithms performance
In computer science it is common to measure algorithms performance by using O notation. Every book on algorithms development will start from this topic and although it is still good rule of thumb, the practical value of O-notation now becoming obsolete.
For example Mathworks dropped Flops since version 6, the command which was a good indicator of number of floating points operations in second. For another example see Is multiplication slower then addition, where Prof Daniel Lemire after perfoming basic tests concludes that “Hence, simple computational cost models (such as counting the number of multiplications) may not hold on modern superscalar processors.”
During my PhD thesis development, I compared different version Particle filter – stochastic algorithm, which performance depends on number of particles used with Hough Transform based algorithms, which performance depends on a size of the grid in accumulator. In this post, I will show how Pareto optimal points can be used as good visualisation techniques for algorithms comparison.
Tags: algorithms, pareto front, science
