Towards Exploratory Quality Diversity Landscape Analysis

Abstract: This work is a preliminary study on using Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) for Quality Diversity (QD) problems. We seek to understand whether ELA features can potentially be used to characterise QD problems paving the way for automating QD algorithm selection. Our results demonstrate that ELA features are affected by QD optimisation differently than random sampling, and more specifically, by the choice of variation operator, behaviour function, archive size and problem dimensionality.