Software Systems Clustering Using Estimation of Distribution Approach

Abstract

Abstract Software clustering is usually used for program understanding. Since the software clustering is a NP-complete problem, a number of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are proposed for solving this problem. In literature, there are two wellknown GAs for software clustering, namely, Bunch and DAGC, that use the genetic operators such as crossover and mutation to better search the solution space and generating better solutions during genetic algorithm evolutionary process. The major drawbacks of these operators are (1) the difficulty of defining operators, (2) the difficulty of determining the probability rate of these operators, and (3) do not guarantee to maintain building blocks. Estimation of Distribution (EDA) based approaches, by removing crossover and mutation operators and maintaining building blocks, can be used to solve the problems of genetic algorithms. This approach creates the probabilistic models from individuals to generate new population during evolutionary process, aiming to achieve more success in solving the problems. The aim of this paper is to recast EDA for software clustering problems, which can overcome the existing genetic operators’ limitations. For achieving this aim, we propose a new distribution probability function and a new EDA based algorithm for software clustering. To the best knowledge of the authors, EDA has not been investigated to solve the software clustering problem. The proposed EDA has been compared with two well-known genetic algorithms on twelve benchmarks. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides more accurate results, improves the speed of convergence and provides better stability when compared against existing genetic algorithms such as Bunch and DAGC.