Cluster-guided LLM-Based Anonymization of Software Analytics Data: Studying Privacy-Utility Trade-offs in JIT Defect Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Khan, Maaz, Khan, Gul Sher, Raza, Ahsan, Ullah, Pir Sami, Bangash, Abdul Ali
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Khan, Maaz
Khan, Gul Sher
Raza, Ahsan
Ullah, Pir Sami
Bangash, Abdul Ali
author_facet Khan, Maaz
Khan, Gul Sher
Raza, Ahsan
Ullah, Pir Sami
Bangash, Abdul Ali
contents The increasing use of machine learning (ML) for Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction raises concerns about privacy leakage from software analytics data. Existing anonymization methods, such as tabular transformations and graph perturbations, often overlook contextual dependencies among software metrics, leading to suboptimal privacy-utility tradeoffs. Leveraging the contextual reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a cluster-guided anonymization technique that preserves contextual and statistical relationships within JIT datasets. Our method groups commits into feature-based clusters and employs an LLM to generate context-aware parameter configurations for each commit cluster, defining alpha-beta ratios and churn mixture distributions used for anonymization. Our evaluation on six projects (Cassandra, Flink, Groovy, Ignite, OpenStack, and Qt) shows that our LLM-based approach achieves privacy level 2 (IPR >= 80 percent), improving privacy by 18 to 25 percent over four state-of-the-art graph-based anonymization baselines while maintaining comparable F1 scores. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can act as adaptive anonymization engines when provided with cluster-specific statistical information about similar data points, enabling context-sensitive and privacy-preserving software analytics without compromising predictive accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_12224
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cluster-guided LLM-Based Anonymization of Software Analytics Data: Studying Privacy-Utility Trade-offs in JIT Defect Prediction
Khan, Maaz
Khan, Gul Sher
Raza, Ahsan
Ullah, Pir Sami
Bangash, Abdul Ali
Software Engineering
Cryptography and Security
The increasing use of machine learning (ML) for Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction raises concerns about privacy leakage from software analytics data. Existing anonymization methods, such as tabular transformations and graph perturbations, often overlook contextual dependencies among software metrics, leading to suboptimal privacy-utility tradeoffs. Leveraging the contextual reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a cluster-guided anonymization technique that preserves contextual and statistical relationships within JIT datasets. Our method groups commits into feature-based clusters and employs an LLM to generate context-aware parameter configurations for each commit cluster, defining alpha-beta ratios and churn mixture distributions used for anonymization. Our evaluation on six projects (Cassandra, Flink, Groovy, Ignite, OpenStack, and Qt) shows that our LLM-based approach achieves privacy level 2 (IPR >= 80 percent), improving privacy by 18 to 25 percent over four state-of-the-art graph-based anonymization baselines while maintaining comparable F1 scores. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can act as adaptive anonymization engines when provided with cluster-specific statistical information about similar data points, enabling context-sensitive and privacy-preserving software analytics without compromising predictive accuracy.
title Cluster-guided LLM-Based Anonymization of Software Analytics Data: Studying Privacy-Utility Trade-offs in JIT Defect Prediction
topic Software Engineering
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12224