Effective API recommendation without historical software repositories

Abstract

It is time-consuming and labor-intensive to learn and locate the correct API for programming tasks. Thus, it is beneficial to perform API recommendation automatically. The graph-based statistical model has been shown to recommend top-10 API candidates effectively. It falls short, however, in accurately recommending an actual top-1 API. To address this weakness, we propose RecRank, an approach and tool that applies a novel ranking-based discriminative approach leveraging API usage path features to improve top-1 API recommendation. Empirical evaluation on a large corpus of (1385+8) open source projects shows that RecRank significantly improves top-1 API recommendation accuracy and mean reciprocal rank when compared to state-of-the-art API recommendation approaches.