Software defect prediction based on stacked sparse denoising autoencoders and enhanced extreme learning machine

Abstract

Software defect prediction is an important software quality assurance technique. Nevertheless, the prediction performance of the constructed model is easily susceptible to irrelevant or redundant features in the software projects and is not predominant enough. To address these two issues, a novel defect prediction model called SSEPG based on Stacked Sparse Denoising AutoEncoders (SSDAE) and Extreme Learning Maching (ELM) optimised by Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) and another complementary Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) are proposed in this paper, which has two main merits: (1) employ a novel deep neural network – SSDAE to extract new combined features, which can effectively learn the robust deep semantic feature representation. (2) integrate strong exploitation capacity of PSO with strong exploration capability of GSA to optimise the input weights and hidden layer biases of ELM, and utilise the superior discriminability of the enhanced ELM to predict the defective modules. The SSDAE is compared with eleven state-of-the-art feature extraction methods in effect and efficiency, and the SSEPG model is compared with multiple baseline models that contain five classic defect predictors and three variants across 24 software defect projects. The experimental results exhibit the superiority of the SSDAE and the SSEPG on six evaluation metrics.