An Implementation of FP-Growth Algorithm for Software Specification Mining

Specification mining is a machine learning approach for discovering formal specifications of the protocols that code must obey when interacting with an application program interface or abstract data type. Two major concerns in engineering software systems are high maintenance costs and reliability of systems. To reduce maintenance efforts, there is a need for automated tools to help software developers understand their existing code base. So, there is a need to extract specifications to aid program comprehension. In this paper a novel technique to efficiently mine software specifications, called FP_TraceMiner is proposed which mines software specifications from program execution traces. The FP-growth algorithm is currently one of the fastest approaches. To address the limitations of Apriori-like methods, a mining paradigm has been proposed, which uses FP-growth algorithm which transforms a database into FP-tree stored in main memory and then performs mining on that optimized FP-tree structure.