Data balancing improves self-admitted technical debt detection |
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Author: | Sridharan, Murali1; Mäntylä, Mika1; Rantala, Leevi1; |
Organizations: |
1M3S, ITEE University of Oulu Oulu, Finland |
Format: | article |
Version: | accepted version |
Access: | open |
Online Access: | PDF Full Text (PDF, 0.3 MB) |
Persistent link: | http://urn.fi/urn:nbn:fi-fe2021102151872 |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,
2021
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Publish Date: | 2021-10-21 |
Description: |
AbstractA high imbalance exists between technical debt and non-technical debt source code comments. Such imbalance affects Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) detection performance, and existing literature lacks empirical evidence on the choice of balancing technique. In this work, we evaluate the impact of multiple balancing techniques, including Data level, Classifier level, and Hybrid, for SATD detection in Within-Project and Cross-Project setup. Our results show that the Data level balancing technique SMOTE or Classifier level Ensemble approaches Random Forest or XGBoost are reasonable choices depending on whether the goal is to maximize Precision, Recall, F1, or AUC-ROC. We compared our best-performing model with the previous SATD detection benchmark (cost-sensitive Convolution Neural Network). Interestingly the top-performing XGBoost with SMOTE sampling improved the Within-project F1 score by 10% but fell short in Cross-Project set up by 9%. This supports the higher generalization capability of deep learning in Cross-Project SATD detection, yet while working within individual projects, classical machine learning algorithms can deliver better performance. We also evaluate and quantify the impact of duplicate source code comments in SATD detection performance. Finally, we employ SHAP and discuss the interpreted SATD features. We have included the replication package1 and shared a web-based SATD prediction tool2 with the balancing techniques in this study. see all
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Series: |
IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories |
ISSN: | 2160-1852 |
ISSN-E: | 2160-1860 |
ISSN-L: | 2160-1852 |
ISBN: | 978-1-7281-8710-5 |
ISBN Print: | 978-1-6654-2985-6 |
Pages: | 358 - 368 |
Article number: | 9463080 |
DOI: | 10.1109/MSR52588.2021.00048 |
OADOI: | https://oadoi.org/10.1109/MSR52588.2021.00048 |
Host publication: |
18th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2021 |
Conference: |
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories |
Type of Publication: |
A4 Article in conference proceedings |
Field of Science: |
113 Computer and information sciences |
Subjects: | |
Funding: |
The authors acknowledge the financial support by the Academy of Finland (grant ID 328058) and computational infrastructure by CSC Finland. |
Academy of Finland Grant Number: |
328058 |
Detailed Information: |
328058 (Academy of Finland Funding decision) |
Copyright information: |
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