A novel code representation for detecting Java code clones using high-level and abstract compiled code representations

Fahmi H Quradaa, Sara Shahzad, Rashad Saeed and Mubarak M Sufyan

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 5, 1-31

Abstract: In software development, it’s common to reuse existing source code by copying and pasting, resulting in the proliferation of numerous code clones—similar or identical code fragments—that detrimentally affect software quality and maintainability. Although several techniques for code clone detection exist, many encounter challenges in effectively identifying semantic clones due to their inability to extract syntax and semantics information. Fewer techniques leverage low-level source code representations like bytecode or assembly for clone detection. This work introduces a novel code representation for identifying syntactic and semantic clones in Java source code. It integrates high-level features extracted from the Abstract Syntax Tree with low-level features derived from intermediate representations generated by static analysis tools, like the Soot framework. Leveraging this combined representation, fifteen machine-learning models are trained to effectively detect code clones. Evaluation on a large dataset demonstrates the models’ efficacy in accurately identifying semantic clones. Among these classifiers, ensemble classifiers, such as the LightGBM classifier, exhibit exceptional accuracy. Linearly combining features enhances the effectiveness of the models compared to multiplication and distance combination techniques. The experimental findings indicate that the proposed method can outperform the current clone detection techniques in detecting semantic clones.

Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0302333 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 02333&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0302333

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302333

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().