Fault Prediction Using Statistical and Machine Learning Methods for Improving Software Quality

Abstract

An understanding of quality attributes is relevant for the software organization to deliver high software reliability. An empirical assessment of metrics to predict the quality attributes is essential in order to gain insight about the quality of software in the early phases of software development and to ensure corrective actions. In this paper, we predict a model to estimate fault proneness using Object Oriented CK metrics and QMOOD metrics. We apply one statistical method and six machine learning methods to predict the models. The proposed models are validated using dataset collected from Open Source software. The results are analyzed using Area Under the Curve (AUC) obtained from Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis. The results show that the model predicted using the random forest and bagging methods outperformed all the other models. Hence, based on these results it is reasonable to claim that quality models have a significant relevance with Object Oriented metrics and that machine learning methods have a comparable performance with statistical methods.