Insights into Exploration and Exploitation Power of Optimization Algorithm Using DSCTool

When making statistical analysis of single-objective optimization algorithms’ performance, researchers usually estimate it according to the obtained optimization results in the form of minimal/maximal values. Though this is a good indicator about the performance of the algorithm, it does not provide any information about the reasons why it happens. One possibility to get additional information about the performance of the algorithms is to study their exploration and exploitation abilities. In this paper, we present an easy-to-use step by step pipeline that can be used for performing exploration and exploitation analysis of single-objective optimization algorithms. The pipeline is based on a web-service-based e-Learning tool called DSCTool, which can be used for making statistical analysis not only with regard to the obtained solution values but also with regard to the distribution of the solutions in the search space. Its usage does not require any special statistic knowledge from the user. The gained knowledge from such analysis can be used to better understand algorithm’s performance when compared to other algorithms or while performing hyperparameter tuning.