Visualizing the computational intelligence field [Application Notes]

In this paper, we visualize the structure and the evolution of the computational intelligence (CI) field. Based on our visualizations, we analyze the way in which the CI field is divided into several subfields. The visualizations provide insight into the characteristics of each subfield and into the relations between the subfields. By comparing two visualizations, one based on data from 2002 and one based on data from 2006, we examine how the CI field has evolved over the last years. A quantitative analysis of the data further identifies a number of emerging areas within the CI field. The data that we use consist of the abstracts of the papers presented at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI) in 2002 and 2006. Using a fully automatic procedure, so-called concept maps are constructed from the data. These maps visualize the associations between the main concepts in the CI field. Our analysis of the structure and the evolution of the CI field are largely based on the constructed concept maps