The traveling salesman problem is to find tours through all cities at minimum cost ; simply visiting the cities only once that a salesman wants to visit. As such, the traveling salesman problem is a NP-complete problem ; an heuristic algorithm is preferred to an exact algorithm. In this paper, we suggest an effective cost relaxation using a candidate arc set which is obtained from a regression function for the traveling salesman problem. The proposed method sufficiently consider the characteristics of cost of arcs compared to existing methods that randomly choose the arcs for relaxation. For test beds, we used 31 instances over 100 cities existing from TSPLIB and randomly generated 100 instances from well-known instance generators. For almost every instances, the proposed method has found efficiently better solutions than the existing method.