Extended Association Rule Mining and Its Application to Software Engineering Data Sets

Association rule mining is a highly effective approach to data analysis for datasets of varying sizes, accommodating diverse feature values. Nevertheless, deriving practical rules from datasets with numerical variables presents a challenge, as these variables must be discretized beforehand. Quantitative association rule mining addresses this issue, allowing the extraction of valuable rules. This paper introduces an extension to quantitative association rules, incorporating a two-variable function in their consequent part. The use of correlation functions, statistical test functions, and error functions is also introduced. We illustrate the utility of this extension through three case studies employing software engineering datasets. In case study 1, we successfully pinpointed the conditions that result in either a high or low correlation between effort and software size, offering valuable insights for software project managers. In case study 2, we effectively identified the conditions that lead to a high or low correlation between the number of bugs and source lines of code, aiding in the formulation of software test planning strategies. In case study 3, we applied our approach to the two-step software effort estimation process, uncovering the conditions most likely to yield low effort estimation errors.