A Multi-Metric Ranking with Label Correlations Approach for Library Migration Recommendations

While third-party libraries provide benefit to software systems, they also bring unique challenges. It often happens that developers need to replace some already-used libraries with other functionality-equivalent libraries. However, it is not easy to find a relevant candidate from overwhelming libraries. Despite several approaches have been proposed to mine library migrations from historical data, the study of library recommendation from the perspective of both open-source projects and third-party libraries is lacking. Therefore, conducting such research may assist developer better select suitable third-party libraries. In this paper, we propose a multi-metric ranking with label correlations (MMRLC) algorithm, which can recommend libraries holistically from the both perspectives. Not only does it mine library migrations from existing software data, MMRLC further leverages label correlations of libraries in Maven Central Repository to make recommendations. To demonstrate the usefulness, three popular algorithms were conducted on a benchmark dataset for comparison. The results show that our approach can recommend libraries with precision @ 1 of 0.8454 and recall @20 of 0.9301. Moreover, to demonstrate the generality, we select 366 libraries and resort to TagWiki to generate the related library labels, and the results show that our approach still has comparable performance.