Technical Debt (TD) prediction is crucial to preventing software quality degradation and maintenance cost increase. Recent Machine Learning (ML) approaches have shown promising results in TD prediction, but the imbalanced TD datasets can have a negative impact on ML model performance. Although previous TD studies have investigated various oversampling techniques that generates minority class instances to mitigate the imbalance, potentials of undersampling techniques have not yet been thoroughly explored due to the concerns about information loss. To address this gap, we investigate the impact of undersampling on ML model performance for TD prediction by utilizing 17,797 classes from 25 Java open-source projects. We compare the performance of ML models with different undersampling techniques and evaluate the impact of combining them with widely used oversampling techniques in TD studies. Our findings reveal that (i) undersampling can significantly improve ML model performance compared to oversampling and no resampling; (ii) the combined application of undersampling and oversampling techniques leads to a synergy of further performance improvement compared to applying each technique exclusively. Based on these results, we recommend practitioners to explore various undersampling techniques and their combinations with oversampling techniques for more effective TD prediction.This package is for the replication of 'Less is More: an Empirical Study of Undersampling Techniques for Technical Debt Prediction'File list:X.csv, Y.csv: - These are the datasets for the study, used in the ipynb file below.under_over_sampling_scripts.ipynb: - These scripts can obtain all the experimental results from the study. - They can be run through Jupyter Notebook or Google Colab. - The required packages are listed at the top in the file, so installation via pip or conda is necessary before running.Results_for_all_tables.csv: This is a csv file that summarizes all the results obtained from the study.

Thyroid disease classification plays a crucial role in early diagnosis and effective treatment of thyroid disorders. Machine learning (ML) techniques have demonstrated remarkable potential in this domain, offering accurate and efficient diagnostic tools. Most of the real-life datasets have imbalanced characteristics that hamper the overall performance of the classifiers. Existing data balancing techniques process the whole dataset at a time that sometimes causes overfitting and underfitting. However, the complexity of some ML models, often referred to as “black boxes,” raises concerns about their interpretability and clinical applicability. This paper presents a comprehensive study focused on the analysis and interpretability of various ML models for classifying thyroid diseases. In our work, we first applied a new data-balancing mechanism using a clustering technique and then analyzed the performance of different ML algorithms. To address the interpretability challenge, we explored techniques for model explanation and feature importance analysis using eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) tools globally as well as locally. Finally, the XAI results are validated with the domain experts. Experimental results have shown that our proposed mechanism is efficient in diagnosing thyroid disease and can explain the models effectively. The findings can contribute to bridging the gap between adopting advanced ML techniques and the clinical requirements of transparency and accountability in diagnostic decision-making.

The comparison of different ML algorithms on EN dataset in group AB.s.

Performance measure of our scheme using K-means+SMOTE+ENN.

Rank and frequency of the domain expert’s opinion.

Thyroid disease classification plays a crucial role in early diagnosis and effective treatment of thyroid disorders. Machine learning (ML) techniques have demonstrated remarkable potential in this domain, offering accurate and efficient diagnostic tools. Most of the real-life datasets have imbalanced characteristics that hamper the overall performance of the classifiers. Existing data balancing techniques process the whole dataset at a time that sometimes causes overfitting and underfitting. However, the complexity of some ML models, often referred to as “black boxes,” raises concerns about their interpretability and clinical applicability. This paper presents a comprehensive study focused on the analysis and interpretability of various ML models for classifying thyroid diseases. In our work, we first applied a new data-balancing mechanism using a clustering technique and then analyzed the performance of different ML algorithms. To address the interpretability challenge, we explored techniques for model explanation and feature importance analysis using eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) tools globally as well as locally. Finally, the XAI results are validated with the domain experts. Experimental results have shown that our proposed mechanism is efficient in diagnosing thyroid disease and can explain the models effectively. The findings can contribute to bridging the gap between adopting advanced ML techniques and the clinical requirements of transparency and accountability in diagnostic decision-making.

Vehicular Networks (VN) utilizing Software Defined Networking (SDN) have garnered significant attention recently, paralleling the advancements in wireless networks. VN are deployed to optimize traffic flow, enhance the driving experience, and ensure road safety. However, VN are vulnerable to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, posing severe threats in the contemporary Internet landscape. With the surge in Internet traffic, this study proposes novel methodologies for effectively detecting DDoS attacks within Software-Defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN), wherein attackers commandeer compromised nodes to monopolize network resources, disrupting communication among vehicles and between vehicles and infrastructure. The proposed methodology aims to: (i) analyze statistical flow and compute entropy, and (ii) implement Machine Learning (ML) algorithms within SDN Intrusion Detection Systems for Internet of Things (IoT) environments. Additionally, the approach distinguishes between reconnaissance, Denial of Service (DoS), and DDoS traffic by addressing the challenges of imbalanced and overfitting dataset traces. One of the significant challenges in this integration is managing the computational load and ensuring real-time performance. The ML models, especially complex ones like Random Forest, require substantial processing power, which necessitates efficient data handling and possibly leveraging edge computing resources to reduce latency. Ensuring scalability and maintaining high detection accuracy as network traffic grows and evolves is another critical challenge. By leveraging a minimal subset of features from a given dataset, a comparative study is conducted to determine the optimal sample size for maximizing model accuracy. Further, the study evaluates the impact of various dataset attributes on performance thresholds. The K-nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression supervised ML classifiers are assessed using the BoT-IoT dataset. The results indicate that the Random Forest classifier achieves superior performance metrics, with Precision, F1-score, Accuracy, and Recall rates of 92%, 92%, 91%, and 90%, respectively, over five iterations.

With the exponential growth in the daily publication of scientific articles, automatic classification and categorization can assist in assigning articles to a predefined category. Article titles are concise descriptions of the articles’ content with valuable information that can be useful in document classification and categorization. However, shortness, data sparseness, limited word occurrences, and the inadequate contextual information of scientific document titles hinder the direct application of conventional text mining and machine learning algorithms on these short texts, making their classification a challenging task. This study firstly explores the performance of our earlier study, TextNetTopics on the short text. Secondly, here we propose an advanced version called TextNetTopics Pro, which is a novel short-text classification framework that utilizes a promising combination of lexical features organized in topics of words and topic distribution extracted by a topic model to alleviate the data-sparseness problem when classifying short texts. We evaluate our proposed approach using nine state-of-the-art short-text topic models on two publicly available datasets of scientific article titles as short-text documents. The first dataset is related to the Biomedical field, and the other one is related to Computer Science publications. Additionally, we comparatively evaluate the predictive performance of the models generated with and without using the abstracts. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed approach in handling the imbalanced data, particularly in the classification of Drug-Induced Liver Injury articles as part of the CAMDA challenge. Taking advantage of the semantic information detected by topic models proved to be a reliable way to improve the overall performance of ML classifiers.

Hyperparameters tuning of the classifiers using gridsearchCV.

The summarized responses from the survey in three categories.

Performance comparison with traditional ML models.