Data visualization is the process of transforming data, information, and knowledge into visual form, making use of humans’ natural visual capabilities which reveals relationships in data sets that are not evident from the raw data, by using mathematical techniques to reduce the number of dimensions in the data set while preserving the relevant inherent properties. In this paper, we formulated data visualization as a Quadric Assignment Problem (QAP), and then presented an Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) to solve the resulted discrete optimization problem. The idea behind this approach is to provide mechanisms based on ABC to overcome trapped in local minima and improving the resulted solutions. To demonstrate the application of ABC on discrete optimization in data visualization, we used a database of electricity load and compared the results to other popular methods such as SOM, MDS and Sammon's map. The results show that QAP-ABC has high performance with compared others. پرونده مقاله