HeuristicLab FAQ

How to cite HeuristicLab?

If you find HeuristicLab useful and employ it to develop your own software or solve an interesting application problem, please share improvements or enhancements with us and the metaheuristic community (as per the GNU General Public License). In particular, if you publish any results derived from the use of HeuristicLab, we will be grateful, if you cite the following reference in your papers:

• S. Wagner et al. Architecture and Design of the HeuristicLab Optimization Environment. In Advanced Methods and Applications in Computational Intelligence, Topics in Intelligent Engineering and Informatics Series, Springer, pp. 197-261. 2014. ​BibTeX

Why does HeuristicLab crash during the start up?

If you have extracted the HeuristicLab zip with the windows explorer, the containing files get marked as blocked, because they were downloaded from the another computer (screenshot). You could either unblock all HeuristicLab DLLs or extract them with another zip-program (e.g., ​7zip).

What's wrong, if controls are not correctly resized in the HeuristicLab Optimizer?

On some machines it might happen that controls are not correctly resized and the HeuristicLab GUI looks like this:

This behavior results from a bug in the GUI frameworks (either Windows Forms or the Dock Panel Suite). There are two known causes for this problem. The first one is that the Windows text size is set to a value larger than 100%. To avoid this bug, the Windows text size in the Windows display settings has to be set to 100%. This can be done in the dialog shown below which can be opened from the Windows Control Panel (Control Panel -> Appearance and Personalization -> Display).

The other possible cause for this problem is the "Language for non-Unicode programs" setting of your Windows operating system. There are some languages which we know cause a resizing problem in HeuristicLab, e.g. Latvia. German or English on the other hand work fine. A possible workaround at the moment would be that you switch this setting to German or English. The downside of this is however that applications which don't support Unicode might not display text correctly anymore. The following screen shot shows how you can change this setting:

Please note: In HeuristicLab 3.3.6 there will be a fix for this problem. Take a look at this Blog post for more details.

Please note 2: HeuristicLab 3.3.7 will include a fix for the above mentioned problems for the docking mode.

What is the correct file format to import data-analysis problem data?

Your data file must be available in form of a table. HeuristicLab does not support sparse matrix formats as used for instance by libSVM. To import your data into HeuristicLab you must prepare your data file to follow a comma separated values format (CSV). On import HeuristicLab tries to guess which separator character is used. Allowed separator characters are ';', ',', 'Space' and 'Tab'. The values should be given as real-values and use a period ('.') as decimal separator. German users can also use the comma (',') character as decimal separator, but of course in this case ',' is not allowed as separator character (use either ';', 'Space' or 'TAB'). The first line of the CSV file can contain variable names.

Examples for valid HeuristicLab data-analysis files:

x01 x02 x03 y
1.0 2.0 3.0 0.0
0.0 1.0 2.0 1.0
...

x01 x02 x03 y
1,0 2,0 3,0 0,0
0,0 1,0 2,0 1,0
...

Does HeuristicLab work with Linux or Mac OS X?

Not yet but we are working on porting HeuristicLab to ​Mono. Please take a look at this Blog post for more details and ticket #1861 for the current status of the port.

Why are not all necessary types and namespaces found while building the HeuristicLab solution HeuristicLab.sln?

The reason behind this, is that the HeuristicLab solution got restructured to optimize the build process. During this restructuring all external developed libraries were gathered in a separate solution HeuristicLab.ExtLibs.sln. This solution must be built before the HeuristicLab solution HeuristicLab.sln to supply all necessary external libraries.