Tracking the Exploration and Exploitation in Stochastic Population-Based Nature-Inspired Algorithms Using Recurrence Plots

The success of every stochastic population-based nature-inspired algorithms is characterized through the dichotomy of exploration and exploitation. In general, exploration refers to the evaluation of points in previously untested areas of a search space, while exploitation refers to evaluation of points in close vicinity to previously visited points. How to balance both components properly during the evolutionary process is still considered as a topical problem in the evolutionary computation community. In this paper, we propose a recurrence plot visualization method for evaluating this process. Our analysis shows that recurrence plots are highly appropriate for revealing how particular algorithms balance exploration and exploitation.