On the Identification of the Energy related Issues from the App Reviews

Abstract

The energy inefficiency of the apps can be a major issue for the app users which is discussed on App Stores extensively. Previous research has shown the importance of investigating the energy related app reviews to identify the major causes or categories of energy related user feedback. However, there is no study that efficiently extracts the energy related app reviews automatically. In this paper, we empirically study different techniques for automatic extraction of the energy related user feedback. We compare the accuracy, F1-score and run time of numerous machine-learning models with relevant feature combinations and relatively modern Neural Network-based models. In total, 60 machine learning models are compared to 30 models that we build using six neural network architectures and three word embedding models. We develop a visualization tool for this study through which a developer can traverse through this large-scale result set. The results show that neural networks outperform the other machine learning techniques and can achieve the highest F1-score of 0.935. To replicate the research results, we have open sourced the interactive visualization tool. After identifying the best results and extracting the energy related reviews, we further compare various techniques to help the developers automatically investigate the emerging issues that might be responsible for energy inefficiency of the apps. We experiment the previously used string matching with results obtained from applying two of the state-of-the-art topic modeling algorithms, OBTM and AOLDA. Finally, we run a qualitative study performed in collaboration with developers and students from different institutions to determine their preferences for identifying necessary topics from previously categorized reviews, which shows OBTM produces the most helpful results.