How to Read Many-Objective Solution Sets in Parallel Coordinates
This work addresses visualization issues for researchers in evolutionary many-objective optimization, offering incremental guidelines rather than a new method.
The paper tackles the challenge of visualizing high-dimensional solution sets in many-objective optimization using parallel coordinates, providing observations to improve their interpretation for comparing solution quality, understanding shape and distribution, and reflecting objective relations.
Rapid development of evolutionary algorithms in handling many-objective optimization problems requires viable methods of visualizing a high-dimensional solution set. Parallel coordinates which scale well to high-dimensional data are such a method, and have been frequently used in evolutionary many-objective optimization. However, the parallel coordinates plot is not as straightforward as the classic scatter plot to present the information contained in a solution set. In this paper, we make some observations of the parallel coordinates plot, in terms of comparing the quality of solution sets, understanding the shape and distribution of a solution set, and reflecting the relation between objectives. We hope that these observations could provide some guidelines as to the proper use of parallel coordinates in evolutionary many-objective optimization.