From Discussion to Execution: Replicating Buggy and Correct Data Science Code

Abstract

Reproducing reliable data science code from informal sources is challenging due to ambiguous problem specifications, missing dependencies, and performance bottlenecks. Although developer Q&A forums provide rich discussions on diagnosing and fixing real-world issues, the information is often incomplete and unstructured, limiting its use for automated debugging and verification. In this paper, we introduce Reprodgen, a large language model (LLM) based framework for automatically replicating executable buggy and patched data science programs from Q&A forum posts. Given a question and its corresponding answer, Reprodgen reconstructs the buggy behavior described in the question and the intended fix described in the answer, producing executable buggy and patched code pairs that reflect the original discussion. The framework builds structured representations of code intent (CI), functional requirements (FR), and Structured Chain of Thought (SCoT), and iteratively refines code using an LLM-based reviewer until it is executable and semantically consistent. We evaluate Reprodgen on Stack Overflow (SO) and GitHub Issues (GI) across seven data science libraries, including pandas, numpy, and scikit-learn, and construct a benchmark of runnable buggy and patched programs validated by human experts. Our pipeline uses LLMs for semantic assessment, while executability is verified through actual execution. Results show reliable replication with clear differences in model performance.