Metarule-guided association rule mining for program understanding
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Software systems are expected to change over their lifetime in order to remain useful. Understanding a software system that has undergone changes is often difficult owing to the unavailability of up-to-date documentation. Under these circumstances, source code is the only reliable means of information regarding the system. In the paper, association rule mining is applied to the problem of software understanding i.e. given the source files of a software system, association rule mining is used to gain an insight into the software. To make association rule mining more effective, constraints are placed on the mining process in the form of metarules. Metarule-guided mining is carried out to find associations which can be used to identify recurring problems within software systems. Metarules are related to re-engineering patterns which present solutions to these problems. Association rule mining is applied to five legacy systems and results presented show how extracted association rules can be helpful in analysing the structure of a software system and modifications to improve the structure are suggested. A comparison of the results obtained for the five systems also reveals legacy system characteristics, which can lead to understanding the nature of open source legacy software and its evolution.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it