Visualizing Multimodality in Combinatorial Search Landscapes
This is an incremental review paper for researchers in optimization and visualization, with no new methods or data introduced.
The paper reviews visualization techniques for combinatorial search landscapes, emphasizing multimodality, and concludes that no single method is universally best, offering recommendations for future work.
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.