An Exploratory Analysis for Studying Software Evolution: Time-Delayed Correlation Analysis
PAPER: 11 TITLE: An Exploratory Analysis for Studying Software Evolution: Time-Delayed Correlation Analysis AUTHORS: Yosuke Yamatani and Masao Ohira
OVERALL EVALUATION: 1 (weak accept) REVIEWER'S CONFIDENCE: 2 (low)
This paper proposes a method for an exploratory analysis of software evolution, called delayed correlation analysis (DCA). DCA extends the correlation analysis to consider a time gap between any pair of metrics, and returns the highest correlation coefficient for each pair of metrics. With various metrics, the authors conducted a case study and reported some detailed results.
Pros:
http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7727/how-to-correlate-two-time-series-with-gaps-and-different-time-bases http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/23993/how-to-correlate-two-time-series-with-possible-time-differences http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~ccloy/project_time_delayed/index.html http://maxi.riken.jp/FirstYear/proceedings/pdf/Scargle_Jeffrey_D.-bin-20110413063416.pdf http://maxi.riken.jp/FirstYear/ppt/O26SCARGLE.pdf http://www.itc.nl/~rossiter/teach/R/R_ts.pdf
Cons:
Minor comments:
PAPER: 11 TITLE: An Exploratory Analysis for Studying Software Evolution: Time-Delayed Correlation Analysis AUTHORS: Yosuke Yamatani and Masao Ohira
OVERALL EVALUATION: 1 (weak accept) REVIEWER'S CONFIDENCE: 3 (medium)
Summary: This paper proposes a technique to take into account the existence of time lags in correlation analysis of software metrics. The authors conducted an empirical study with three OSS projects and 100 metrics. The authors checked all the possible combinations of the metrics with various setting values, and found some hidden correlations that cannot be found with traditional approaches.
Pros:
Comments:
Minor Comments:
PAPER: 11 TITLE: An Exploratory Analysis for Studying Software Evolution: Time-Delayed Correlation Analysis AUTHORS: Yosuke Yamatani and Masao Ohira
OVERALL EVALUATION: 0 (borderline paper) REVIEWER'S CONFIDENCE: 4 (high)
I fundamentally disagree with the idea of randomly looking for strong correlations. Software Engineering datasets are much too large to do this, there will be all kinds of meaningless relationships that you’ll find. Understand the process then look at the data. That being said, I like how you get around the stationary property of CCF by using DCA. I don’t understand your results and your discussion is weak.
At first, I didn’t understand how your delayed correlation was different from the standard cross-correlation. As you point out with CCF you need a stationary process and software development is not stationary, for example, release #1 might take two weeks, while release #2 might take 4 weeks. Since the release date is not regular, user bugs will sometimes occur after two weeks and sometimes after four weeks, so the correlation at 2 and 4 weeks will be lower than it would be if we grouped release that took 2 and releases that took 4 weeks independently. The authors DCA technique effectively looks at each correlation independently and only keeps the strong correlations.
I don’t understand the results that you have. How can you tell us anything without first telling us the lag which had the highest correlations? Perhaps you could tell us the variance in correlation at each lag? You can’t just take the top correlation and tell us there’s a strong correlation. When you have such large datasets there will be random strong relationships between almost all variables. The discussion is not a discuss and the results are much to hard to understand.