96 research outputs found
Test Set Diameter: Quantifying the Diversity of Sets of Test Cases
A common and natural intuition among software testers is that test cases need
to differ if a software system is to be tested properly and its quality
ensured. Consequently, much research has gone into formulating distance
measures for how test cases, their inputs and/or their outputs differ. However,
common to these proposals is that they are data type specific and/or calculate
the diversity only between pairs of test inputs, traces or outputs.
We propose a new metric to measure the diversity of sets of tests: the test
set diameter (TSDm). It extends our earlier, pairwise test diversity metrics
based on recent advances in information theory regarding the calculation of the
normalized compression distance (NCD) for multisets. An advantage is that TSDm
can be applied regardless of data type and on any test-related information, not
only the test inputs. A downside is the increased computational time compared
to competing approaches.
Our experiments on four different systems show that the test set diameter can
help select test sets with higher structural and fault coverage than random
selection even when only applied to test inputs. This can enable early test
design and selection, prior to even having a software system to test, and
complement other types of test automation and analysis. We argue that this
quantification of test set diversity creates a number of opportunities to
better understand software quality and provides practical ways to increase it.Comment: In submissio
Ontology-based composition and matching for dynamic cloud service coordination
Recent cross-organisational software service offerings, such as cloud computing, create higher integration needs.
In particular, services are combined through brokers and mediators, solutions to allow individual services to collaborate and their interaction to be coordinated are required. The need to address dynamic management - caused by cloud and on-demand environments - can be addressed through service coordination based on ontology-based composition and matching techniques. Our solution to composition and matching utilises a service coordination space that acts as a passive infrastructure for collaboration where users submit requests that are then selected and taken on by providers. We discuss the information models and the coordination principles of such a collaboration environment in terms of an ontology and its underlying description logics. We provide ontology-based solutions for structural composition of descriptions and matching between requested and provided services
The Weight Function in the Subtree Kernel is Decisive
Tree data are ubiquitous because they model a large variety of situations,
e.g., the architecture of plants, the secondary structure of RNA, or the
hierarchy of XML files. Nevertheless, the analysis of these non-Euclidean data
is difficult per se. In this paper, we focus on the subtree kernel that is a
convolution kernel for tree data introduced by Vishwanathan and Smola in the
early 2000's. More precisely, we investigate the influence of the weight
function from a theoretical perspective and in real data applications. We
establish on a 2-classes stochastic model that the performance of the subtree
kernel is improved when the weight of leaves vanishes, which motivates the
definition of a new weight function, learned from the data and not fixed by the
user as usually done. To this end, we define a unified framework for computing
the subtree kernel from ordered or unordered trees, that is particularly
suitable for tuning parameters. We show through eight real data classification
problems the great efficiency of our approach, in particular for small
datasets, which also states the high importance of the weight function.
Finally, a visualization tool of the significant features is derived.Comment: 36 page
Document similarity
In recent years, development of tools and methods for measuring document similarity has become a thriving field in informatics, computer science, and digital humanities. Historically, questions of document similarity have been (and still are) important or even crucial in a large variety of situations. Typically, similarity is judged by criteria which depend on context. The move from traditional to digital text technology has not only provided new possibilities for discovery and measurement of document similarity, it has also posed new challenges. Some of these challenges are technical, others conceptual. This paper argues that a particular, well-established, traditional way of starting with an arbitrary document and constructing a document similar to it, namely transcription, may fruitfully be brought to bear on questions concerning similarity criteria for digital documents. Some simple similarity measures are presented and their application to marked up documents are discussed. We conclude that when documents are encoded in the same vocabulary, n-grams constructed to include markup can be used to recognize structural similarities between documents.publishedVersio
Compact Binary Relation Representations with Rich Functionality
Binary relations are an important abstraction arising in many data
representation problems. The data structures proposed so far to represent them
support just a few basic operations required to fit one particular application.
We identify many of those operations arising in applications and generalize
them into a wide set of desirable queries for a binary relation representation.
We also identify reductions among those operations. We then introduce several
novel binary relation representations, some simple and some quite
sophisticated, that not only are space-efficient but also efficiently support a
large subset of the desired queries.Comment: 32 page
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