Experiments with clustering as a software remodularization method
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
As valuable software systems get old, reverse engineering becomes more and more important to the companies that have to maintain the code. Clustering is a key activity in reverse engineering to discover a better design of the systems or to extract significant concepts from the code. Clustering is an old activity, highly sophisticated, offering many methods to answer different needs. Although these methods have been well documented in the past, these discussions may not apply entirely to the reverse engineering domain. We study some clustering algorithms and other parameters to establish whether and why they could be used for software remodularization. We study three aspects of the clustering activity: abstract descriptions chosen for the entities to cluster; metrics computing coupling between the entities; and clustering algorithms. The experiments were conducted on three public domain systems (gcc, Linux and Mosaic) and a real world legacy system (2 million LOC). Among other things, we confirm the importance of a proper description scheme of the entities being clustered, we list a few good coupling metrics to use and characterize the quality of different clustering algorithms. We also propose novel description schemes not directly based on the source code and we advocate better formal evaluation methods for the clustering results.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 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