On the Costs and Benefits of Adopting Lifelong Learning for Software Analytics -- Empirical Study on Brown Build and Risk Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Olewicki, Doriane, Habchi, Sarra, Nayrolles, Mathieu, Faramarzi, Mojtaba, Chandar, Sarath, Adams, Bram
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Olewicki, Doriane
Habchi, Sarra
Nayrolles, Mathieu
Faramarzi, Mojtaba
Chandar, Sarath
Adams, Bram
author_facet Olewicki, Doriane
Habchi, Sarra
Nayrolles, Mathieu
Faramarzi, Mojtaba
Chandar, Sarath
Adams, Bram
contents Nowadays, software analytics tools using machine learning (ML) models to, for example, predict the risk of a code change are well established. However, as the goals of a project shift over time, and developers and their habits change, the performance of said models tends to degrade (drift) over time. Current retraining practices typically require retraining a new model from scratch on a large updated dataset when performance decay is observed, thus incurring a computational cost; also there is no continuity between the models as the past model is discarded and ignored during the new model training. Even though the literature has taken interest in online learning approaches, those have rarely been integrated and evaluated in industrial environments. This paper evaluates the use of lifelong learning (LL) for industrial use cases at Ubisoft, evaluating both the performance and the required computational effort in comparison to the retraining-from-scratch approaches commonly used by the industry. LL is used to continuously build and maintain ML-based software analytics tools using an incremental learner that progressively updates the old model using new data. To avoid so-called "catastrophic forgetting" of important older data points, we adopt a replay buffer of older data, which still allows us to drastically reduce the size of the overall training dataset, and hence model training time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_09824
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Costs and Benefits of Adopting Lifelong Learning for Software Analytics -- Empirical Study on Brown Build and Risk Prediction
Olewicki, Doriane
Habchi, Sarra
Nayrolles, Mathieu
Faramarzi, Mojtaba
Chandar, Sarath
Adams, Bram
Software Engineering
Nowadays, software analytics tools using machine learning (ML) models to, for example, predict the risk of a code change are well established. However, as the goals of a project shift over time, and developers and their habits change, the performance of said models tends to degrade (drift) over time. Current retraining practices typically require retraining a new model from scratch on a large updated dataset when performance decay is observed, thus incurring a computational cost; also there is no continuity between the models as the past model is discarded and ignored during the new model training. Even though the literature has taken interest in online learning approaches, those have rarely been integrated and evaluated in industrial environments. This paper evaluates the use of lifelong learning (LL) for industrial use cases at Ubisoft, evaluating both the performance and the required computational effort in comparison to the retraining-from-scratch approaches commonly used by the industry. LL is used to continuously build and maintain ML-based software analytics tools using an incremental learner that progressively updates the old model using new data. To avoid so-called "catastrophic forgetting" of important older data points, we adopt a replay buffer of older data, which still allows us to drastically reduce the size of the overall training dataset, and hence model training time.
title On the Costs and Benefits of Adopting Lifelong Learning for Software Analytics -- Empirical Study on Brown Build and Risk Prediction
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09824