An Extension of STNWeb Functionality: On the Use of Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering as an Advanced Search Space Partitioning Strategy
Camilo Chacón Sartori, Christian Blum, Gabriela V. Ochoa · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference · 2024
Search Trajectory Networks (STNs) serve as a tool for visualizing algorithm behavior within the realm of optimization problems. Despite their user-friendly nature, challenges arise in obtaining interpretable plots, for example, in the case of optimization problems with large solutions or many dimensions. To address this, we have introduced a new search space partitioning strategy utilizing hierarchical agglomerative clustering. This enhanced strategy, now available in STNWeb, the web version of STNs, produces plots that are easier to interpret than those produced by existing search space partitioning strategies. This facilitates an improved understanding of algorithm performance in complex scenarios.