Split-Jaccard Distance of Hierarchical Decompositions for Software Architecture

Abstract

Most previous approaches on comparing the results for software architecture recovery are designed to handle only flat decompositions. In this paper, we propose a novel distance called Split-Jaccard Distance of Hierarchical Decompositions. It extends the Jaccard coefficient and incorporates the concept of the splits of leaves in a hierarchical decomposition. We analyze the proposed distance and derive its properties, including the lower-bound and the metric space.