학술논문

Visualizing Population Dynamics to Examine Algorithm Performance
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation IEEE Trans. Evol. Computat. Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on. 26(6):1501-1510 Dec, 2022
Subject
Computing and Processing
Statistics
Sociology
Data visualization
Visualization
Optimization
Heuristic algorithms
Geometry
Landmark multidimensional scaling (LMDS)
multi- and many-objective optimization
visualization
Language
ISSN
1089-778X
1941-0026
Abstract
This work assesses the efficacy of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) using an intuitive multidimensional scaling (MDS) visualization of the evolution of a population. We propose the use of landmark MDS (LMDS) to overcome computational challenges inherent to visualizing many-objective and complex problems with MDS. For the benchmark problems we tested, LMDS is akin to MDS visually, whilst requiring less than 1% of the time and memory necessary to produce an MDS visualization of the same objective space solutions, leading to the possibility of online visualizations for multi- and many-objective optimization evaluation. Using multi- and many-objective problems from the DTLZ and WFG benchmark test suites, we analyze how Landmark MDS visualizations can offer far greater insight into algorithm performance than using traditional algorithm performance metrics such as hypervolume alone, and can be used to complement explicit performance metrics. Ultimately, this visualization allows the visual identification of problem features and assists the decision maker in making intuitive recommendations for algorithm parameters/operators for creating and testing better EAs to solve multi- and many-objective problems.