Metaheurstic Behaviour Analysis: Relating Search Behaviour to Algorithmic Components - Reproducibility and Supplementary Results

This repository contains the code for the experiments and evaluation, as well as all produced figures for the work on Metaheurstic Behaviour Analysis: Relating Search Behaviour to Algorithmic Components. Experiments and data collection: The experiments are based on the MAHF software framework (the most recent version can be found at https://github.com/mahf-opt/mahf). Reproducing them can be done utilising the scripts in 'experiment-behaviour-analysis' (see the corresponding README for more details).The results are logged in .cbor files. Analysis: The analysis can be reproduced using the scripts in 'evaluation-behaviour-analysis' (again, please see the respective README for details).It entails the basic processing of the data, descriptive statistics and visualisations, the application of clustering and dimensionality reduction on the data and subsequent visualisation and pairwise performance comparisons of algorithmic configurations. Supplementary Results: Figures and Tables: All visualisations and relevant numerical results generated in the data analysis are provided here.The figures are summarised by the analayis part they results from, i.e. 'descriptive', 'clustering' and 'dimensionality_reduction'.Within these folders, results are sorted by algorithmic dataset. Further Reading: Helena Stegherr, Michael Heider, Jonathan Wurth, and Jörg Hähner. “A Comparison of Dimensionality Reduction Techniques for Visualising Search Behaviour”. In: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO’25 Companion). ACM, 2025. doi: https: //doi.org/10.1145/3712255.3726648. Helena Stegherr, Michael Heider, and Jörg Hähner. “A Comparison of Clustering Approaches for Metaheuristic Behaviour Data”. In: Computational Intelligence. SpringerNature Switzerland, 2025, pp. 305–322. isbn: 9783031852527. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-85252-7_17. Helena Stegherr, Michael Heider, and Jörg Hähner. “Assisting Convergence Behaviour Characterisation with Unsupervised Clustering”. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence. SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, 2023, pp. 108–118. doi: 10.5220/0012202100003595. Jonathan Wurth, Helena Stegherr, Michael Heider, Leopold Luley, and Jörg Hähner. “Fast, Flexible, and Fearless: A Rust Framework for the Modular Construction of Metaheuristics”. In: Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. GECCO ’23 Companion. ACM, 2023. doi: 10.1145/3583133.3596335.