Comparison of clustering algorithms in the context of software evolution
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
To aid software analysis and maintenance tasks, a number of software clustering algorithms have been proposed to automatically partition a software system into meaningful subsystems or clusters. However, it is unknown whether these algorithms produce similar meaningful clusterings for similar versions of a real-life software system under continual change and growth. This paper describes a comparative study of six software clustering algorithms. We applied each of the algorithms to subsequent versions from five large open source systems. We conducted comparisons based on three criteria respectively: stability (Does the clustering change only modestly as the system undergoes modest updating?), authoritative-ness (Does the clustering reasonably approximate the structure an authority provides?) and extremity of cluster distribution (Does the clustering avoid huge clusters and many very small clusters?). Experimental results indicate that the studied algorithms exhibit distinct characteristics. For example, the clusterings from the most stable algorithm bear little similarity to the implemented system structure, while the clusterings from the least stable algorithm has the best cluster distribution. Based on obtained results, we claim that current automatic clustering algorithms need significant improvement to provide continual support for large software projects.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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