Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Simulated Annealing (SA) is one of the oldest metaheuristics and has been adapted to solve many combinatorial optimization problems. Over the years, many authors have proposed both general and problem-specific improvements and variants of SA. We propose to accumulate this knowledge into automatically configurable, algorithmic frameworks so that for new applications that wealth of alternative algorithmic components is directly available for the algorithm designer without further manual intervention. Here, we describe SA as an ensemble of algorithmic components, and describe SA variants from the literature within these components. We show the advantages of our proposal by (i) implementing existing algorithmic components of variants of SA, (ii) studying SA algorithms proposed in the literature, (iii) improving SA performance by automatically designing new state-ofthe-art SA implementations and (iv) studying the role and impact of the algorithmic components based on experimental data. Our experiments consider three common combinatorial optimization problems, the quadratic assignment problem and two variants of the permutation flow shop problem.

In order to better understand the relations between different risk factors in the predisposition to type 2 diabetes, we present a Bayesian Network analysis of a large dataset, composed of three European population studies. Our results show, together with a key role of metabolic syndrome and of glucose after 2 hours of an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test, the importance of education, measured as the number of years of study, in the predisposition to type 2 diabetes.

We study the impact of altering the sampling space of parameters in automatic algorithm configurators. We show that a proper transformation can strongly improve the convergence towards better configurations; at the same time, biases about good parameter values, possibly based on misleading prior knowledge, may lead to wrong choices in the transformations and be detrimental for the configuration process. To emphasize the impact of the transformations, we initially study their effect on configuration tasks with a single parameter in different experimental settings. We also propose a mechanism of how to adapt the transformation used and give exemplary experimental results with that scheme. We also propose a mechanism for how to adapt towards an appropriate transformation and give exemplary experimental results of that scheme.