Package equivalence in complex software network

TL;DR

This paper evaluates graph-structure-based methods to identify similar npm packages within a large dependency network, aiming to enhance package recommendation systems.

Contribution

It introduces and compares methods for categorizing similar packages solely based on network structure, addressing a gap in package recommendation research.

Findings

Effective graph-based similarity measures identified

Structural methods outperform naive approaches

Results applicable to large-scale software dependency networks

Abstract

The public package registry npm is one of the biggest software registry. With its 216 911 software packages, it forms a big network of software dependencies. In this paper we evaluate various methods for finding similar packages in the npm network, using only the structure of the graph. Namely, we want to find a way of categorizing similar packages, which would be useful for recommendation systems. This size enables us to compute meaningful results, as it softened the particularities of the graph. Npm is also quite famous as it is the default package repository of Node.js. We believe that it will make our results interesting for more people than a less used package repository. This makes it a good subject of analysis of software networks.