Empirical Study on Defects in R Programming Language and Core Packages

The R programming language that provides a variety of statistical calculation functions is considered to be one of the programming languages most suitable for artificial intelligence.The correctness of the language implementation is a prerequisite for the correctness of the programs developed with such a language.However, there are inevitably many defects in the R programming language.This paper conducts an empirical study on defects in the R programming language and its core packages.By analyzing 7020 issues, we find that: 1) Among all the 35 versions involved in these defects, there are the most defects in R 3.1.2,R 3.0.2 and R 3.5.0,and these defects are primarily distributed in a few components such as Documentation, Graphics, Language.2) The components with higher overall defect priority include Startup, Installation and Analyses, and the components with higher overall defect severity include I/O,Installation and Accuracy.There is a significant intermediate correlation between the priority and severity o