ARCHIVES Modeling by Example

Software developers use modeling to explore design alternatives before investing in the higher costs of building the full system. Unlike constructing specific examples, construct-ing general models is challenging and error-prone. Modeling By Example (MBE) is a new tool designed to help programmers construct general models faster and without errors. Given an object model and an acceptable, or included, example, MBE generates near-hit and near-miss examples for the user to mark as included or not by their mental goal model. The marked examples form a training data-set from which MBE constructs the user's gen-eral model. By generating examples dynamically to direct its own learning, MBE learns the concrete goal model with a significantly smaller training data set size than conventional instance-based learning techniques. Empirical experiments show that MBE is a practical solution for constructing simple structural models, but even with a number of optimizations to improve performance does not scale to learning complex models