An analysis of dimensionality reduction techniques for visualizing evolution

We consider the problem of visualizing the population dynamics along an evolutionary run using a dimensionality reduction technique for mapping individuals from the original search space to a 2-D space. We quantitatively assess four of these techniques in terms of their ability to preserve useful information about (a) population movements and (b) exploration-exploitation trade-off. We propose two compact visualizations aimed at highlighting these two aspects of population dynamics and evaluate them qualitatively. The results are very promising as the proposed framework is indeed able to represent crucial properties of population dynamics in a way that is both highly informative and simple to understand.