A Machine Learning Based Approach for Evaluating Clone Detection Tools for a Generalized and Accurate Precision
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
An important measure of clone detection performance is precision. However, there has been a marked lack of research into methods for efficiently and accurately measuring the precision of a clone detection tool. Instead, tool authors simply validate a small random sample of the clones their tools detected in a subject software system. Since there could be many thousands of clones reported by the tool, such a small random sample cannot guarantee an accurate and generalized measure of the tool’s precision for all the varieties of clones that can occur in any arbitrary software system. In this paper, we propose a machine-learning-based approach that can cluster similar clones together, and which can be used to maximize the variety of clones examined when measuring precision, while significantly reducing the biases a specific subject system has on the generality of the precision measured. Our technique reduces the efforts in measuring precision, while doubling the variety of clones validated and reducing biases that harm the generality of the measure by up to an order of magnitude. Our case study with the NiCad clone detector and the Java class library shows that our approach is effective in efficiently measuring an accurate and generalized precision of a subject clone detection tool.
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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 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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