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Applications of psychological science for actionable analytics

Published: 26 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

According to psychological scientists, humans understand models that most match their own internal models, which they characterize as lists of "heuristic"s (i.e. lists of very succinct rules). One such heuristic rule generator is the Fast-and-Frugal Trees (FFT) preferred by psychological scientists. Despite their successful use in many applied domains, FFTs have not been applied in software analytics. Accordingly, this paper assesses FFTs for software analytics.
We find that FFTs are remarkably effective in that their models are very succinct (5 lines or less describing a binary decision tree) while also outperforming result from very recent, top-level, conference papers. Also, when we restrict training data to operational attributes (i.e., those attributes that are frequently changed by developers), the performance of FFTs are not effected (while the performance of other learners can vary wildly).
Our conclusions are two-fold. Firstly, there is much that software analytics community could learn from psychological science. Secondly, proponents of complex methods should always baseline those methods against simpler alternatives. For example, FFTs could be used as a standard baseline learner against which other software analytics tools are compared.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ESEC/FSE 2018: Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
October 2018
987 pages
ISBN:9781450355735
DOI:10.1145/3236024
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 October 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Decision trees
  2. defect prediction
  3. empirical studies
  4. heuristics
  5. psychological science
  6. software analytics

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  • (2024)A Formal Explainer for Just-In-Time Defect PredictionsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/3664809Online publication date: 14-May-2024
  • (2024)Towards a framework for reliable performance evaluation in defect predictionScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2024.103164238:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2024
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