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Comparing and experimenting machine learning techniques for code smell detection

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Abstract

Several code smell detection tools have been developed providing different results, because smells can be subjectively interpreted, and hence detected, in different ways. In this paper, we perform the largest experiment of applying machine learning algorithms to code smells to the best of our knowledge. We experiment 16 different machine-learning algorithms on four code smells (Data Class, Large Class, Feature Envy, Long Method) and 74 software systems, with 1986 manually validated code smell samples. We found that all algorithms achieved high performances in the cross-validation data set, yet the highest performances were obtained by J48 and Random Forest, while the worst performance were achieved by support vector machines. However, the lower prevalence of code smells, i.e., imbalanced data, in the entire data set caused varying performances that need to be addressed in the future studies. We conclude that the application of machine learning to the detection of these code smells can provide high accuracy (>96 %), and only a hundred training examples are needed to reach at least 95 % accuracy.

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Notes

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_techniques

  2. http://pmd.sourceforge.net/

  3. B-J48 Pruned is the Pruned variant of J48, with AdaBoostM1 applied. All algorithms with a “B-” prefix in the name are boosted algorithms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy

    Francesca Arcelli Fontana, Marco Zanoni & Alessandro Marino

  2. University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Mika V. Mäntylä

  3. Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

    Mika V. Mäntylä

Authors
  1. Francesca Arcelli Fontana
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  2. Mika V. Mäntylä
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  3. Marco Zanoni
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  4. Alessandro Marino
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marco Zanoni.

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Communicated by: Tim Menzies

Appendix

Appendix

Table 22

Table 22 Projects characteristics
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Table 23

Table 23 Metric names
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Table 24

Table 24 Custom metrics names
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Arcelli Fontana, F., Mäntylä, M.V., Zanoni, M. et al. Comparing and experimenting machine learning techniques for code smell detection. Empir Software Eng 21, 1143–1191 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-015-9378-4

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