New sub-areas or fields within software engineering are not that common, but they come up once in a while. The authors of this article (https://doi-org.ezproxy.ub.gu.se/10.1007/s10664-020-09808-9, Better software analytics via “DUO”: Data mining algorithms using/used-by optimizers) argue that this is the case now.
In this article, the authors provide a view that data mining and building optimization models are done in tandem and that this is the new field. They show that the data mined from repositories influences optimization models and that the development of models influences data mining.
The authors make the following claims (quoted from the paper, references removed):
- Claim1:For software engineering tasks, optimization and data mining are very similar. Hence, it is natural and simple to combine the two methods.
- Claim2:For software engineering tasks. optimizers can greatly improve data miners. A data miner’s default tuners can lead to sub-optimal performance. Automatic optimizers can find tunings that dramatically improve that performance.
- Claim3:For software engineering tasks, data miners can greatly improve optimization. If a data miner groups together related items, an optimizer can explore and report conclusions that are general across a set of solutions. Further, optimization for SE problems can be very slow. But if that optimization executes over the groupings found by a data miner, that inference can terminate orders of magnitude faster.
- Claim4:For software engineering tasks, data mining without optimization is not recommended. Conclusions reached from an unoptimized data miner can be changed, sometimes even dramatically improved, by running the same tuned learner on the same data. Researchers in data mining should, therefore, consider adding an optimization step to their analysis.
These claims make a lot of sense and they are aligned with my observations. I recommend this article for everyone who is working at or developing a metric team or a data analysis/data science team.
