Approach For Software Defect Prediction Research Articles

Neighbor cleaning learning based cost‐sensitive ensemble learning approach for software defect prediction

SummaryThe class imbalance problem in software defect prediction datasets leads to prediction results that are biased toward the majority class, and the class overlap problem leads to fuzzy boundaries for classification decisions, both of which affect the model's prediction performance on the dataset. A neighbor cleaning learning (NCL) is an effective technique for defect prediction. To solve the class overlap problem and class imbalance problem, the NCL‐based cost‐sensitive ensemble learning approach for software defect prediction (NCL_CSEL) model is proposed. First, the bootstrap resampled data are trained using the base classifier. Subsequently, multiple classifiers are integrated by a static ensemble to obtain the final classification results. As the base classifier, the Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) classifier combining NCL and cost‐sensitive learning is proposed, and the class overlap problem and class imbalance problem are solved by balancing the proportion of overlap sample removal in NCL and the size of the cost factor in cost‐sensitive learning. Specifically, the NCL algorithm is used to initialize the sample weights, while the cost‐sensitive method is employed to update the sample weights. Experiments based on the NASA dataset and AEEEM dataset show that the defect prediction model can improve the bal value by approximately 7% and the AUC value by 9.5% when the NCL algorithm is added. NCL_CSEL can effectively solve the class imbalance problem and significantly improve the prediction performance compared with existing methods for solving the class imbalance problem.

Evaluating the Impact of Data Transformation Techniques on the Performance and Interpretability of Software Defect Prediction Models

The performance of software defect prediction (SDP) models determines the priority of test resource allocation. Researchers also use interpretability techniques to gain empirical knowledge about software quality from SDP models. However, SDP methods designed in the past research rarely consider the impact of data transformation methods, simple but commonly used preprocessing techniques, on the performance and interpretability of SDP models. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the impact of three data transformation methods (Log, Minmax, and Z-score) on the performance and interpretability of SDP models. Through empirical research on (i) six classification techniques (random forest, decision tree, logistic regression, Naive Bayes, K-nearest neighbors, and multilayer perceptron), (ii) six performance evaluation indicators (Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1, MCC, and AUC), (iii) two interpretable methods (permutation and SHAP), (iv) two feature importance measures (Top-k feature rank overlap and difference), and (v) three datasets (Promise, Relink, and AEEEM), our results show that the data transformation methods can significantly improve the performance of the SDP models and greatly affect the variation of the most important features. Specifically, the impact of data transformation methods on the performance and interpretability of SDP models depends on the classification techniques and evaluation indicators. We observe that log transformation improves NB model performance by 7%–61% on the other five indicators with a 5% drop in Precision. Minmax and Z-score transformation improves NB model performance by 2%–9% across all indicators. However, all three transformation methods lead to substantial changes in the Top-5 important feature ranks, with differences exceeding 2 in 40%–80% of cases (detailed results available in the main content). Based on our findings, we recommend that (1) considering the impact of data transformation methods on model performance and interpretability when designing SDP approaches as transformations can improve model accuracy, and potentially obscure important features, which lead to challenges in interpretation, (2) conducting comparative experiments with and without the transformations to validate the effectiveness of proposed methods which are designed to improve the prediction performance, and (3) tracking changes in the most important features before and after applying data transformation methods to ensure precise and traceable interpretability conclusions to gain insights. Our study reminds researchers and practitioners of the need for comprehensive considerations even when using other similar simple data processing methods.

A Software Defect Prediction Approach Based on Hybrid Feature Dimensionality Reduction

Software defect prediction (SDP) is designed to assist software testing, which can reasonably allocate test resources to reduce costs and improve development efficiency. In order to improve the prediction performance, researchers have designed many defect-related features for SDP. However, feature redundancy (FR) and irrelevance caused by the increasing dimensions of data will greatly degrade the performance of defect prediction. In order to solve the problems, researchers have proposed various data dimensionality reduction methods. These methods can be simply divided into two categories of methods: feature selection and feature extraction. However, the two categories of methods have their own advantages and limitation. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Feature Dimensionality Reduction Approach (HFDRA) for SDP, which combines the two different kinds of methods, to improve the performance of SDP. HFDRA approach can be divided into two stages: feature selection and feature extraction. First, HFDRA divides the original features into several feature subsets through a clustering algorithm in the feature selection stage. Then, in the feature extraction stage, kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is used to reduce the dimensionality of each feature subset. Finally, the reduced-dimensional data is used to build the prediction model. In the empirical study, we use 22 projects from AEEEM, SOFTLAB, MORP, and ReLink as experiment object. In this paper, we first compare our approach with seven baseline methods and three state-of-the-art methods. Then, we analyze the relationship between FR and prediction performance. Experiment results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art data dimensionality reduction methods for defect prediction.

Implement Classification Approach for Software Defect Prediction

Implement Classification Approach for Software Defect Prediction

Hybrid Optimization-Based Neural Network Classifier for Software Defect Prediction

The software is applied in various areas so the quality of the software is very important. The software defect prediction (SDP) is used to solve the software issues and enhance the quality. The robustness and reliability are the major concerns in the existing SDP approaches. Hence, in this paper, the hybrid optimization-based neural network (Optimized NN) is developed for the effective detection of the defects in the software. The two main steps involved in the Optimized NN-based SDP are feature selection and SDP utilizing Optimized NN. The data is fed forwarded to the feature selection module, where relief algorithm selects the significant features relating to the defect and no-defects. The features are fed to the SDP module, and the optimal tuning of NN classifier is obtained by the hybrid optimization developed by the integration of the social spider algorithm (SSA) and gray wolf optimizer (GWO). The comparative analysis of the developed prediction model reveals the effectiveness of the proposed method that attained the maximum accuracy of 93.64%, maximum sensitivity of 95.14%, maximum specificity of 99%, maximum [Formula: see text]-score of 93.53%, and maximum precision of 99% by considering the [Formula: see text]-fold.

A novel approach for software defect prediction using CNN and GRU based on SMOTE Tomek method

Software defect prediction (SDP) plays a vital role in enhancing the quality of software projects and reducing maintenance-based risks through the ability to detect defective software components. SDP refers to using historical defect data to construct a relationship between software metrics and defects via diverse methodologies. Several prediction models, such as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), have been developed and adopted to recognize software module defects, and many methodologies and frameworks have been presented. Class imbalance is one of the most challenging problems these models face in binary classification. However, When the distribution of classes is imbalanced, the accuracy may be high, but the models cannot recognize data instances in the minority class, leading to weak classifications. So far, little research has been done in the previous studies that address the problem of class imbalance in SDP. In this study, the data sampling method is introduced to address the class imbalance problem and improve the performance of ML models in SDP. The proposed approach is based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) combined with a synthetic minority oversampling technique plus the Tomek link (SMOTE Tomek) to predict software defects. To establish the efficiency of the proposed models, the experiments have been conducted on benchmark datasets obtained from the PROMISE repository. The experimental results have been compared and evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, Matthew’s correlation coefficient (MCC), the area under the ROC curve (AUC), the area under the precision-recall curve (AUCPR), and mean square error (MSE). The experimental results showed that the proposed models predict the software defects more effectively on the balanced datasets than the original datasets, with an improvement of up to 19% for the CNN model and 24% for the GRU model in terms of AUC. We compared our proposed approach with existing SDP approaches based on several standard performance measures. The comparison results demonstrated that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art SDP approaches on most datasets.

A Hierarchical Feature Ensemble Deep Learning Approach for Software Defect Prediction

Software defect prediction can detect modules that may have defects in advance and optimize resource allocation to improve test efficiency and reduce development costs. Traditional features cannot capture deep semantic and grammatical information, which limits the further development of software defect prediction. Therefore, it has gradually become a trend to use deep learning technology to automatically learn valuable deep features from source code or relevant data. However, most software defect prediction methods based on deep learning extraction features from a single information source or only use a single deep learning model, which leads to the fact that the extracted features are not comprehensive enough to affect the final prediction performance. In view of this, this paper proposes a Hierarchical Feature Ensemble Deep Learning (HFEDL) Approach for software defect prediction. Firstly, the HFEDL approach needs to obtain three types of information sources: abstract syntax tree (AST), class dependency network (CDN) and traditional features. Then, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory based on Attention mechanism (BiLSTM+Attention) are used to extract different valuable features from the three information sources and multiple prediction sub-models are constructed. Next, all the extracted features are fused by a filter mechanism to obtain more comprehensive features and construct a fusion prediction sub-model. Finally, all the sub-models are integrated by an ensemble learning method to obtain the final prediction model. We use 11 projects in the PROMISE defect repository and evaluate our approach in both non-effort-aware and effort-aware scenarios. The experimental results show that the prediction performance of our approach is superior to state-of-the-art methods in both scenarios.

A cognitive and neural network approach for software defect prediction

Software defect prediction is used to assist developers in finding potential defects and allocating their testing efforts as the scale of software grows. Traditional software defect prediction methods primarily concentrate on creating static code metrics that are fed into machine learning classifiers to predict defects in the code. To achieve the desired classifier performance, appropriate design decisions are required for deep neural network (DNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN) models. This is especially important when predicting software module fault proneness. When correctly identified, this could help to reduce testing costs by concentrating efforts on the modules that have been identified as fault prone. This paper proposes a CONVSDP and DNNSDP (cognitive and neural network) approach for predicting software defects. Python Programming Language with Keras and TensorFlow was used as the framework. From three NASA system datasets (CM1, KC3, and PC1) selected from PROMISE repository, a comparative analysis with machine learning algorithms (such as Random Forest (RF), Decision Trees (DT), Nave Bayes (NF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) in terms of F-Measure (known as F1-score), Recall, Precision, Accuracy, Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) and Area Under Curve (AUC) has been presented. We extract four dataset attributes from the original datasets and use them to estimate the development effort, development time, and number of errors. The number of operands, operators, branch count, and executable LOCs are among these attributes. Furthermore, a new parameter called cognitive weight (Wc) of Basic Control Structure (BCS) is proposed to make the proposed cognitive technique more effective, and a cognitive data set of 8 features for NASA system datasets (CM1, KC3, and PC1) selected from the PROMISE repository to predict software defects is created. The experimental results showed that the CONVSDP and DNNSDP models was comparable to existing classifiers in both original datasets and cognitive data sets, and that it outperformed them in most of the experiments.

A clustering approach for software defect prediction using hybrid social mimic optimization algorithm

A clustering approach for software defect prediction using hybrid social mimic optimization algorithm

Machine learning approach for software defect prediction using multi-core parallel computing

Machine learning approach for software defect prediction using multi-core parallel computing

Correlation-based modified long short-term memory network approach for software defect prediction

Correlation-based modified long short-term memory network approach for software defect prediction

A Weighted Ada-Boosting Approach for Software Defect Prediction using Characterized Code Features Associated with Software Quality

A Weighted Ada-Boosting Approach for Software Defect Prediction using Characterized Code Features Associated with Software Quality

A New Learning to Rank Approach for Software Defect Prediction

Software defect prediction is one of the most active research fields in software development. The outcome of defect prediction models provides a list of the most likely defect-prone modules that need a huge effort from quality assurance teams. It can also help project managers to effectively allocate limited resources to validating software products and invest more effort in defect-prone modules. As the size of software projects grows, error prediction models can play an important role in assisting developers and shortening the time it takes to create more reliable software products by ranking software modules based on their defects. Therefore, there is need a learning-to-rank approach that can prioritize and rank defective modules to reduce testing effort, cost, and time. In this paper, a new learning to rank approach was developed to help the QA team rank the most defect-prone modules using different regression models. The proposed approach was evaluated on a set of standardized datasets using well-known evaluation measures such as Fault-Percentile Average (FPA), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and the Cumulative Lift Chart (CLC). Also, our proposed approach was compared with some other regression models that are used for software defect prediction, such as Random Forest (RF), Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Zero Inflated Regression (ZIR), Zero Inflated Poisson (ZIP), and Negative Polynomial Regression (NPR). Based on the results, the measurement criteria were different than each other as there was a gap in the accuracy obtained for defects prediction due to the nature of the random data, and thus was higher for RF and SVR, as well as FPA achieved better results than MAE and RMSE in this research paper.

Software Defect Prediction: An Ensemble Learning Approach

Software defect prediction plays an increasingly critical role in emerging software systems. However, existing software defect prediction approaches typically suffer from low accuracy due to the under/over fitting problems. To address this problem, we propose an ensemble learning approach to achieve the accurate defect prediction, where various machine learning algorithms, i.e., artificial neural network, random forest, k-nearest neighbour methods are integrated together. The proposed software defect prediction workflow is introduced. Experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Extensive experiment results verify that our proposed method can improve the defect prediction accuracy when compared with existing methods.

Discriminating features-based cost-sensitive approach for software defect prediction

Correlated quality metrics extracted from a source code repository can be utilized to design a model to automatically predict defects in a software system. It is obvious that the extracted metrics will result in a highly unbalanced data, since the number of defects in a good quality software system should be far less than the number of normal instances. It is also a fact that the selection of the best discriminating features significantly improves the robustness and accuracy of a prediction model. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is twofold, first it selects the best discriminating features that help in accurately predicting a defect in a software component. Secondly, a cost-sensitive logistic regression and decision tree ensemble-based prediction models are applied to the best discriminating features for precisely predicting a defect in a software component. The proposed models are compared with the most recent schemes in the literature in terms of accuracy, area under the curve, and recall. The models are evaluated using 11 datasets and it is evident from the results and analysis that the performance of the proposed prediction models outperforms the schemes in the literature.

Bootstrap aggregation ensemble learning-based reliable approach for software defect prediction by using characterized code feature

Bootstrap aggregation ensemble learning-based reliable approach for software defect prediction by using characterized code feature

CSSG: A cost‐sensitive stacked generalization approach for software defect prediction

SummaryThe prediction of software artifacts on defect‐prone (DP) or non‐defect‐prone (NDP) classes during the testing phase helps minimize software business costs, which is a classification task in software defect prediction (SDP) field. Machine learning methods are helpful for the task, although they face the challenge of data imbalance distribution. The challenge leads to serious misclassification of artifacts, which will disrupt the predictor's performance. The previously developed stacking ensemble methods do not consider the cost issue to handle the class imbalance problem (CIP) over the training dataset in the SDP field. To bridge this research gap, in the cost‐sensitive stacked generalization (CSSG) approach, we try to combine the staking ensemble learning method with cost‐sensitive learning (CSL) since the CSL purpose is to reduce misclassification costs. In the cost‐sensitive stacked generalization (CSSG) approach, logistic regression (LR) and extremely randomized trees classifiers in cases of CSL and cost‐insensitive are used as a final classifier of stacking scheme. To evaluate the performance of CSSG, we use six performance measures. Several experiments are carried out to compare the CSSG with some cost‐sensitive ensemble methods on 15 benchmark datasets with different imbalance levels. The results indicate that the CSSG can be an effective solution to the CIP than other compared methods.

Software Defect Prediction Using Ensemble Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent advances in the domain of software defect prediction (SDP) include the integration of multiple classification techniques to create an ensemble or hybrid approach. This technique was introduced to improve the prediction performance by overcoming the limitations of any single classification technique. This research provides a systematic literature review on the use of the ensemble learning approach for software defect prediction. The review is conducted after critically analyzing research papers published since 2012 in four well-known online libraries: ACM, IEEE, Springer Link, and Science Direct. In this study, five research questions covering the different aspects of research progress on the use of ensemble learning for software defect prediction are addressed. To extract the answers to identified questions, 46 most relevant papers are shortlisted after a thorough systematic research process. This study will provide compact information regarding the latest trends and advances in ensemble learning for software defect prediction and provide a baseline for future innovations and further reviews. Through our study, we discovered that frequently employed ensemble methods by researchers are the random forest, boosting, and bagging. Less frequently employed methods include stacking, voting and Extra Trees. Researchers proposed many promising frameworks, such as EMKCA, SMOTE-Ensemble, MKEL, SDAEsTSE, TLEL, and LRCR, using ensemble learning methods. The AUC, accuracy, F-measure, Recall, Precision, and MCC were mostly utilized to measure the prediction performance of models. WEKA was widely adopted as a platform for machine learning. Many researchers showed through empirical analysis that features selection, and data sampling was necessary pre-processing steps that improve the performance of ensemble classifiers.

Feature Selection Using Artificial Immune Network: An Approach for Software Defect Prediction

Software Defect Prediction (SDP) is a dynamic research field in the software industry. A quality software product results in customer satisfaction. However, the higher the number of user requirements, the more complex will be the software, with a correspondingly higher probability of failure. SDP is a challenging task requiring smart algorithms that can estimate the quality of a software component before it is handed over to the end-user. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach to address this particular issue. Our approach combines the feature selection capability of the Optimized Artificial Immune Networks (Opt-aiNet) algorithm with benchmark machine-learning classifiers for the better detection of bugs in software modules. Our proposed methodology was tested and validated using 5 open-source National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) data sets from the PROMISE repository: CM1, KC2, JM1, KC1 and PC1. Results were reported in terms of accuracy level and of an AUC with highest accuracy, namely, 94.82%. The results of our experiments indicate that the detection capability of benchmark classifiers can be improved by incorporating Opt-aiNet as a feature selection (FS) method.

A novel software defect prediction approach using modified objective cluster analysis

AbstractA novel approach for software defect prediction of unlabeled datasets is proposed using modified objective cluster analysis (OCA). In this approach, the first step is to construct the distance matrix of instances in the datasets by utilizing the automatically determined clusters through the modified OCA. Then the dipoles within different instances are categorized into two different groups. Finally, the clusters of instances are produced, and software defects can be predicted by imposing a modified consistency criterion. Case study and comparative experiments were conducted based on 12 public datasets selected from the databases of Promise and ReLink using multiple different unsupervised algorithms and cross‐project approaches. There are two experimental settings: experiments with datasets that contain all metrics and experiments with datasets that contain only module size metrics. The results were evaluated by the index of precision, recall, F‐measure, and receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Furthermore, a complexity analysis of the tested algorithms was conducted as well. In experiments with datasets with all metrics, the proposed OCA gets the best results in four indexes, and the average values of precision, recall, F‐measure, and AUC were improved by a minimum of 1.52%, 2.78%, 19.84%, and 0.93%, respectively. In experiments with datasets with only module size metrics, the proposed OCA performed the best results in four indexes also, and the average values of precision, F‐measure, and AUC were improved by a minimum of 8.8%, 2.59%, and 8.36%, respectively. The proposed algorithm is of low complexity and provides a new way to efficiently predict software defects with unlabeled datasets.