EnHMM: On the Use of Ensemble HMMs and Stack Traces to Predict the Reassignment of Bug Report Fields
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bug reports (BR) contain vital information that can help triaging teams prioritize and assign bugs to developers who will provide the fixes. However, studies have shown that BR fields often contain incorrect information that need to be reassigned, which delays the bug fixing process. There exist approaches for predicting whether a BR field should be reassigned or not. These studies use mainly BR descriptions and traditional machine learning algorithms (SVM, KNN, etc.). As such, they do not fully benefit from the sequential order of information in BR data, such as function call sequences in BR stack traces, which may be valuable for improving the prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, called EnHMM, for predicting the reassignment of BR fields using ensemble Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), trained on stack traces. EnHMM leverages the natural ability of HMMs to represent sequential data to model the temporal order of function calls in BR stack traces. When applied to Eclipse and Gnome BR repositories, EnHMM achieves an average precision, recall, and F-measure of 54%, 76%, and 60% on Eclipse dataset and 41%, 69%, and 51% on Gnome dataset. We also found that EnHMM improves over the best single HMM by 36% for Eclipse and 76% for Gnome. Finally, when comparing EnHMM to Im.ML.KNN, a recent approach in the field, we found that the average F-measure score of EnHMM improves the average F-measure of Im.ML.KNN by 6.80% and improves the average recall of Im.ML.KNN by 36.09%. However, the average precision of EnHMM is lower than that of Im.ML.KNN (53.93% as opposed to 56.71%).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".