Visualizing Multimodality in Combinatorial Search Landscapes

Abstract

This work walks through different visualization techniques for combinatorial search landscapes, focusing on multimodality. We discuss different techniques from the landscape analysis literature, and how they can be combined to provide a more comprehensive view of the search landscape. We also include examples and discuss relevant work to show how others have used these techniques in practice, based on the geometric and aesthetic elements of the Grammar of Graphics. We conclude that there is no free lunch in visualization, and provide recommendations for future work as there are several paths to continue the work in this field.