Efficient mining of iterative patterns for software specification discovery

Studies have shown that program comprehension takes up to 45% of software development costs. Such high costs are caused by the lack-of documented specification and further aggravated by the phenomenon of software evolution. There is a need for automated tools to extract specifications to aid program comprehension. In this paper, a novel technique to efficiently mine common software temporal patterns from traces is proposed. These patterns shed light on program behaviors, and are termed iterative patterns. They capture unique characteristic of software traces, typically not found in arbitrary sequences. Specifically, due to loops, interesting iterative patterns can occur multiple times within a trace. Furthermore, an occurrence of an iterative pattern in a trace can extend across a sequence of indefinite length.Since a program behavior can be manifested in numerous ways, analyzing a single trace will not be sufficient. Iterative pattern mining extends sequential pattern and episode min...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Chao Liu 0001, David Lo, Siau-Cheng Khoo
• Keywords: Data Mining, Frequent Iterative Patterns, Interesting Iterative Patterns, Iterative Patterns, KDD 2007