Incremental Class Dictionary Learning and Optimization

We have previously shown how the discovery of classes from objects can be automated, and how the resulting class organization can be efficiently optimized in the case where the optimum is a single inheritance class hierarchy. This paper extends our previous work by showing how an optimal class dictionary can be learned incrementally. The ability to expand a class organization incrementally as new object examples are presented is an important consideration in software engineering. Keywords: Object-oriented programming and design, reverse engineering, class library organization, class abstraction algorithms. 1 Introduction In class-based object-oriented languages, the user has to define classes before objects can be created. For the novice as well as for the experienced user, the class definitions are a non-trivial abstraction of the objects. We claim it is easier to initially describe certain example objects and to get a proposal for an optimal set of class definitions generated autom..