Abstract:This systematic review explores the use of machine learning (ML) in predicting diabetes, focusing on datasets, algorithms, training methods, and evaluation metrics. It examines datasets like the Singapore National Diabetic Retinopathy Screening program, REPLACE-BG, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, and Pima Indians Diabetes Database. The review assesses the performance of ML algorithms like CNN, SVM, Logistic Regression, and XGBoost in predicting diabetes outcomes. The study emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and ethical considerations in ML-based diabetes prediction models.
Abstract:As the adoption of machine learning (ML) systems continues to grow across industries, concerns about fairness and bias in these systems have taken center stage. Fairness toolkits, designed to mitigate bias in ML models, serve as critical tools for addressing these ethical concerns. However, their adoption in the context of software development remains underexplored, especially regarding the cognitive and behavioral factors driving their usage. As a deeper understanding of these factors could be pivotal in refining tool designs and promoting broader adoption, this study investigates the factors influencing the adoption of fairness toolkits from an individual perspective. Guided by the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2), we examined the factors shaping the intention to adopt and actual use of fairness toolkits. Specifically, we employed Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze data from a survey study involving practitioners in the software industry. Our findings reveal that performance expectancy and habit are the primary drivers of fairness toolkit adoption. These insights suggest that by emphasizing the effectiveness of these tools in mitigating bias and fostering habitual use, organizations can encourage wider adoption. Practical recommendations include improving toolkit usability, integrating bias mitigation processes into routine development workflows, and providing ongoing support to ensure professionals see clear benefits from regular use.
Abstract:Machine learning's widespread adoption in decision-making processes raises concerns about fairness, particularly regarding the treatment of sensitive features and potential discrimination against minorities. The software engineering community has responded by developing fairness-oriented metrics, empirical studies, and approaches. However, there remains a gap in understanding and categorizing practices for engineering fairness throughout the machine learning lifecycle. This paper presents a novel catalog of practices for addressing fairness in machine learning derived from a systematic mapping study. The study identifies and categorizes 28 practices from existing literature, mapping them onto different stages of the machine learning lifecycle. From this catalog, the authors extract actionable items and implications for both researchers and practitioners in software engineering. This work aims to provide a comprehensive resource for integrating fairness considerations into the development and deployment of machine learning systems, enhancing their reliability, accountability, and credibility.
Abstract:The accuracy reported for code smell-detecting tools varies depending on the dataset used to evaluate the tools. Our survey of 45 existing datasets reveals that the adequacy of a dataset for detecting smells highly depends on relevant properties such as the size, severity level, project types, number of each type of smell, number of smells, and the ratio of smelly to non-smelly samples in the dataset. Most existing datasets support God Class, Long Method, and Feature Envy while six smells in Fowler and Beck's catalog are not supported by any datasets. We conclude that existing datasets suffer from imbalanced samples, lack of supporting severity level, and restriction to Java language.
Abstract:This paper proposes a Federated Learning Code Smell Detection (FedCSD) approach that allows organizations to collaboratively train federated ML models while preserving their data privacy. These assertions have been supported by three experiments that have significantly leveraged three manually validated datasets aimed at detecting and examining different code smell scenarios. In experiment 1, which was concerned with a centralized training experiment, dataset two achieved the lowest accuracy (92.30%) with fewer smells, while datasets one and three achieved the highest accuracy with a slight difference (98.90% and 99.5%, respectively). This was followed by experiment 2, which was concerned with cross-evaluation, where each ML model was trained using one dataset, which was then evaluated over the other two datasets. Results from this experiment show a significant drop in the model's accuracy (lowest accuracy: 63.80\%) where fewer smells exist in the training dataset, which has a noticeable reflection (technical debt) on the model's performance. Finally, the last and third experiments evaluate our approach by splitting the dataset into 10 companies. The ML model was trained on the company's site, then all model-updated weights were transferred to the server. Ultimately, an accuracy of 98.34% was achieved by the global model that has been trained using 10 companies for 100 training rounds. The results reveal a slight difference in the global model's accuracy compared to the highest accuracy of the centralized model, which can be ignored in favour of the global model's comprehensive knowledge, lower training cost, preservation of data privacy, and avoidance of the technical debt problem.
Abstract:Context: Test smells are symptoms of sub-optimal design choices adopted when developing test cases. Previous studies have proved their harmfulness for test code maintainability and effectiveness. Therefore, researchers have been proposing automated, heuristic-based techniques to detect them. However, the performance of such detectors is still limited and dependent on thresholds to be tuned. Objective: We propose the design and experimentation of a novel test smell detection approach based on machine learning to detect four test smells. Method: We plan to develop the largest dataset of manually-validated test smells. This dataset will be leveraged to train six machine learners and assess their capabilities in within- and cross-project scenarios. Finally, we plan to compare our approach with state-of-the-art heuristic-based techniques.