A Static Analysis Framework for Data Science Notebooks

10/15/2021

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by   Pavle Subotić, et al.

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Notebooks provide an interactive environment for programmers to develop code, analyse data and inject interleaved visualizations in a single environment. Despite their flexibility, a major pitfall that data scientists encounter is unexpected behaviour caused by the unique out-of-order execution model of notebooks. As a result, data scientists face various challenges ranging from notebook correctness, reproducibility and cleaning. In this paper, we propose a framework that performs static analysis on notebooks, incorporating their unique execution semantics. Our framework is general in the sense that it accommodate for a wide range of analyses, useful for various notebook use cases. We have instantiated our framework on a diverse set of analyses and have evaluated them on 2211 real world notebooks. Our evaluation demonstrates that the vast majority (98.7 well within the time frame required by interactive notebook clients