A partial oracle for uniformity statistics

This paper investigates the problem of testing implementations of uniformity statistics. In this paper we used Metamorphic Testing to address the oracle problem, of checking the output of one or more test executions, for uniformity statistics. We defined a partial oracle that uses regression analysis (a Regression Model based Metamorphic Relation).

We investigated the effectiveness of our partial oracle. We found that the technique can achieve mutation scores ranging from 77.78% to 100%, and tends towards higher mutation scores in this range. These results are promising, and suggest that the Regression Model based Metamorphic Relation approach is a viable method of alleviating the oracle problem in implementations of uniformity statistics, and potentially other classes of statistics e.g. correlation statistics.