Abstract:
Background: Research results in artificial intelligence (AI) are criticized for not being reproducible. Objective: To quantify the state of reproducibility of empirical AI research using six reproducibility metrics measuring three different degrees of reproducibility. Hypotheses: 1) AI research is not documented well enough to reproduce the reported results. 2) Documentation practices have improved over time. Method: The literature is reviewed and a set of variables that should be documented to enable reproducibility are grouped into three factors: Experiment, Data and Method. The metrics describe how well the factors have been documented for a paper. A total of 400 research papers from the conference series IJCAI and AAAI have been surveyed using the metrics. Findings: None of the papers document all of the variables. The metrics show that between 20% and 30% of the variables for each factor are documented. One of the metrics show statistically significant increase over time while the others show no change. Interpretation: The reproducibility scores decrease with in- creased documentation requirements. Improvement over time is found. Conclusion: Both hypotheses are supported.

Published Date: 2018-02-08
Registration: ISSN 2374-3468 (Online) ISSN 2159-5399 (Print)
Copyright: Published by AAAI Press, Palo Alto, California USA Copyright © 2018, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence All Rights Reserved.
DOI:
10.1609/aaai.v32i1.11503