Rigorous Assessment of Model Inference Accuracy using Language Cardinality

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Clun, Donato, Shin, Donghwan, Filieri, Antonio, Bianculli, Domenico
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910568352317440
author Clun, Donato
Shin, Donghwan
Filieri, Antonio
Bianculli, Domenico
author_facet Clun, Donato
Shin, Donghwan
Filieri, Antonio
Bianculli, Domenico
contents Models such as finite state automata are widely used to abstract the behavior of software systems by capturing the sequences of events observable during their execution. Nevertheless, models rarely exist in practice and, when they do, get easily outdated; moreover, manually building and maintaining models is costly and error-prone. As a result, a variety of model inference methods that automatically construct models from execution traces have been proposed to address these issues. However, performing a systematic and reliable accuracy assessment of inferred models remains an open problem. Even when a reference model is given, most existing model accuracy assessment methods may return misleading and biased results. This is mainly due to their reliance on statistical estimators over a finite number of randomly generated traces, introducing avoidable uncertainty about the estimation and being sensitive to the parameters of the random trace generative process. This paper addresses this problem by developing a systematic approach based on analytic combinatorics that minimizes bias and uncertainty in model accuracy assessment by replacing statistical estimation with deterministic accuracy measures. We experimentally demonstrate the consistency and applicability of our approach by assessing the accuracy of models inferred by state-of-the-art inference tools against reference models from established specification mining benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2211_16587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Rigorous Assessment of Model Inference Accuracy using Language Cardinality
Clun, Donato
Shin, Donghwan
Filieri, Antonio
Bianculli, Domenico
Software Engineering
Models such as finite state automata are widely used to abstract the behavior of software systems by capturing the sequences of events observable during their execution. Nevertheless, models rarely exist in practice and, when they do, get easily outdated; moreover, manually building and maintaining models is costly and error-prone. As a result, a variety of model inference methods that automatically construct models from execution traces have been proposed to address these issues. However, performing a systematic and reliable accuracy assessment of inferred models remains an open problem. Even when a reference model is given, most existing model accuracy assessment methods may return misleading and biased results. This is mainly due to their reliance on statistical estimators over a finite number of randomly generated traces, introducing avoidable uncertainty about the estimation and being sensitive to the parameters of the random trace generative process. This paper addresses this problem by developing a systematic approach based on analytic combinatorics that minimizes bias and uncertainty in model accuracy assessment by replacing statistical estimation with deterministic accuracy measures. We experimentally demonstrate the consistency and applicability of our approach by assessing the accuracy of models inferred by state-of-the-art inference tools against reference models from established specification mining benchmarks.
title Rigorous Assessment of Model Inference Accuracy using Language Cardinality
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16587