On the Equivalence of Information Retrieval Methods for Automated Traceability Link Recovery

We present an empirical study to statistically analyze the equivalence of several traceability recovery methods based on Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. The analysis is based on Principal Component Analysis and on the analysis of the overlap of the set of candidate links provided by each method. The studied techniques are the Jensen-Shannon (JS) method, Vector Space Model (VSM), Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The results show that while JS, VSM, and LSI are almost equivalent, LDA is able to capture a dimension unique to the set of techniques which we considered.