Software Defect Prediction Research Articles

A trustworthy hybrid model for transparent software defect prediction: SPAM-XAI.

Maintaining quality in software development projects is becoming very difficult because the complexity of modules in the software is growing exponentially. Software defects are the primary concern, and software defect prediction (SDP) plays a crucial role in detecting faulty modules early and planning effective testing to reduce maintenance costs. However, SDP faces challenges like imbalanced data, high-dimensional features, model overfitting, and outliers. Moreover, traditional SDP models lack transparency and interpretability, which impacts stakeholder confidence in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). We propose SPAM-XAI, a hybrid model integrating novel sampling, feature selection, and eXplainable-AI (XAI) algorithms to address these challenges. The SPAM-XAI model reduces features, optimizes the model, and reduces time and space complexity, enhancing its robustness. The SPAM-XAI model exhibited improved performance after experimenting with the NASA PROMISE repository's datasets. It achieved an accuracy of 98.13% on CM1, 96.00% on PC1, and 98.65% on PC2, surpassing previous state-of-the-art and baseline models with other evaluation matrices enhancement compared to existing methods. The SPAM-XAI model increases transparency and facilitates understanding of the interaction between features and error status, enabling coherent and comprehensible predictions. This enhancement optimizes the decision-making process and enhances the model's trustworthiness in the SDLC.

Software Defect Prediction via Generative Adversarial Networks and Pre-Trained Model

Software Defect Prediction via Generative Adversarial Networks and Pre-Trained Model

Explainable Software Defects Classification Using SMOTE and Machine Learning

Software defect prediction is a critical task in software engineering that aims to identify and mitigate potential defects in software systems. In recent years, numerous techniques and approaches have been developed to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the defect prediction model. In this research paper, we proposed a comprehensive approach that addresses class imbalance by utilizing stratified splitting, explainable AI techniques, and a hybrid machine learning algorithm. To mitigate the impact of class imbalance, we employed stratified splitting during the training and evaluation phases. This method ensures that the class distribution is maintained in both the training and testing sets, enabling the model to learn from and generalize to the minority class examples effectively. Furthermore, we leveraged explainable AI methods, Lime and Shap, to enhance interpretability in the machine learning models. To improve prediction accuracy, we propose a hybrid machine learning algorithm that combines the strength of multiple models. This hybridization allows us to exploit the strength of each model, resulting in improved overall performance. The experiment is evaluated using the NASA-MD datasets. The result revealed that handling the class imbalanced data using stratify splitting approach achieves a better overall performance than the SMOTE approach in Software Defect Detection (SDD).

Software Fault Prediction Using Cross-Project Analysis: A Study on Class Imbalance and Model Generalization

Software Fault Prediction Using Cross-Project Analysis: A Study on Class Imbalance and Model Generalization

Software Fault Prediction Using FeatBoost Feature Selection Algorithm

A critical aspect of software engineering is Software fault prediction which aims to identify and prevent errors in software systems before their release which can cause failures or issues for its users. Various techniques and tools have been developed to detect software faults, including static code analysis, dynamic testing, and machine learning-based approaches. In past few years, the world has seen a growing interest in the use of ML models for predicting software faults, as they can effectively analyse high dimensional datasets and detect complex patterns which are difficult for human experts to detect. However, developing accurate and reliable software fault detection models requires careful selection of data, feature engineering, and model evaluation. This purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive analysis of potential applications and future research directions in the field of software fault detection. The study emphasizes the importance of identifying and addressing software faults to ensure the reliability and efficiency of software systems. Additionally, the paper outlines various approaches and techniques that can be employed for effective software fault detection.

Improving the undersampling technique by optimizing the termination condition for software defect prediction

Improving the undersampling technique by optimizing the termination condition for software defect prediction

Adjusted Trust Score: A Novel Approach for Estimating the Trustworthiness of Software Defect Prediction Models

Adjusted Trust Score: A Novel Approach for Estimating the Trustworthiness of Software Defect Prediction Models

Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction Based on SMOTE and Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis

Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction Based on SMOTE and Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis

Effective Software Defect Prediction: Evaluating Classifiers and Feature Selection with Firefly Algorithm

Effective Software Defect Prediction: Evaluating Classifiers and Feature Selection with Firefly Algorithm

Software Defect Prediction Method Based on Stable Learning

Software Defect Prediction Method Based on Stable Learning

Code Multiview Hypergraph Representation Learning for Software Defect Prediction

Code Multiview Hypergraph Representation Learning for Software Defect Prediction

Refined Software Defect Prediction Using Enhanced JAYA Optimization and Extreme Learning Machine

Refined Software Defect Prediction Using Enhanced JAYA Optimization and Extreme Learning Machine

Enhancing Software Fault Prediction Through Feature Selection With Spider Wasp Optimization Algorithm

Enhancing Software Fault Prediction Through Feature Selection With Spider Wasp Optimization Algorithm

Software Fault Prediction Using Optimal Classifier Selection: An Ensemble Approach

Fault prediction is the process of using data analysis and machine learning models to anticipate potential defects or faults in the software system. Using only the base machine learning models for software fault prediction leads to limited performance, difficulty in handling non-linear relationships and imbalanced data, inadequate feature representation, and limited complexity handling. Hence, in order to overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a new technique for the selection of classifiers that forms a heterogeneous ensemble. The main goal is to remove or trim out the classifiers that show poor performance compared to the other base classifiers, which can result into a more effective ensemble and can produce better results. The algorithm proposed in this paper finds a set of classifiers that can perform better than using all the classifiers. The challenge that was faced was how to identify the poor-performing classifiers. This challenge is dealt with by performing an experiment using different threshold values to choose the trimmed set of classifiers. For evaluation of the proposed model, 8 different benchmark software fault datasets were used, which are taken from PROMISE and the Apache repository, and AUC is used as the performance measure. The results obtained after the experimental analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm compared to the traditional approaches, which used all the base classifiers. There is a significant increase in the AUC values for 6 datasets out of 8, while using the average of probabilities and majority voting, it was seen that there is improvement in 7 out of 8 datasets used. The best-performing dataset by using the average of probabilities is ARC, where the AUC values increase from 0.6505 to 0.694, and while using majority voting, the best-performing dataset is XALAN, where the AUC values increase from 0.5455 to 0.679. From this, it can be seen that the proposed ensemble approach achieved higher AUC values for the tested datasets when compared to the base machine learning classifiers.

Predicting Software Defects in Hybrid MPI and OpenMP Parallel Programs Using Machine Learning

High-performance computing (HPC) and its supercomputers are essential for solving the most difficult issues in many scientific computing domains. The proliferation of computational resources utilized by HPC systems has resulted in an increase in the associated error rates. As such, modern HPC systems promote a hybrid programming style that integrates the message-passing interface (MPI) and open multi-processing (OpenMP). However, this integration often leads to complex defects, such as deadlocks and race conditions, that are challenging to detect and resolve. This paper presents a novel approach: using machine learning algorithms to predict defects in C++-based systems by employing hybrid MPI and OpenMP models. We focus on employing a balanced dataset to enhance prediction accuracy and reliability. Our study highlights the effectiveness of the support vector machine (SVM) classifier, enhanced with term frequency (TF) and recursive feature elimination (RFE) techniques, which demonstrates superior accuracy and performance in defect prediction when compared to other classifiers. This research contributes significantly to the field by providing a robust method for early defect detection in hybrid programming environments, thereby reducing development time, costs and improving the overall reliability of HPC systems.

Exploring better alternatives to size metrics for explainable software defect prediction

Exploring better alternatives to size metrics for explainable software defect prediction

HYBRID BINARY WHALE OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM BASED ON TAPER SHAPED TRANSFER FUNCTION FOR SOFTWARE DEFECT PREDICTION

Reliability is one of the key factors used to gauge software quality. Software defect prediction (SDP) is one of the most important factors which affects measuring software's reliability. Additionally, the high dimensionality of the features has a direct effect on the accuracy of SDP models. The objective of this paper is to propose a hybrid binary whale optimization algorithm (BWOA) based on taper-shape transfer functions for solving feature selection problems and dimension reduction with a KNN classifier as a new software defect prediction method. In this paper, the values of a real vector that represents the individual encoding have been converted to binary vector by using the four types of Taper-shaped transfer functions to enhance the performance of BWOA to reduce the dimension of the search space. The performance of the suggested method (T-BWOA-KNN) was evaluated using eleven standard software defect prediction datasets from the PROMISE and NASA repositories depending on the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier. Seven evaluation metrics have been used to assess the effectiveness of the suggested method. The experimental results have shown that the performance of T-BWOA-KNN produced promising results compared to other methods including ten methods from the literature, four types of T-BWOA with the KNN classifier. In addition, the obtained results are compared and analyzed with other methods from the literature in terms of the average number of selected features (SF) and accuracy rate (ACC) using the Kendall W test. In this paper, a new hybrid software defect prediction method called T-BWOA-KNN has been proposed which is concerned with the feature selection problem. The experimental results have proved that T-BWOA-KNN produced promising performance compared with other methods for most datasets.

Leveraging Ensemble Learning with Generative Adversarial Networks for Imbalanced Software Defects Prediction

Software defect prediction is an active research area. Researchers have proposed many approaches to overcome the imbalanced defect problem and build highly effective machine learning models that are not biased towards the majority class. Generative adversarial networks (GAN) are one of the state-of-the-art techniques that can be used to generate synthetic samples of the minority class and produce a balanced dataset. However, it was not investigated thoroughly in the area of imbalanced defect prediction. In this paper, we proposed to combine GAN-based methods with boosting ensembles to yield robust defect prediction models. GAN-based methods were used to balance the defect datasets, and the AdaBoost ensemble was employed to classify the modules into defective and non-defective modules. Our proposed approach was investigated within the context of 10 software defect datasets with different imbalance ratios. Wilcoxon effect size and Scott–Knott effect size difference tests were used as statistical tests to quantify the model’s performance differences statistically. Empirical results indicated that GAN-based methods need hyperparameter optimization when used for imbalanced software defect prediction. In comparison to the traditional sampling techniques, GAN methods outperformed all traditional techniques when used for imbalanced defect prediction. Lastly, results demonstrated that GAN-based methods should not be combined with undersampling to handle imbalance problems.

Handling uncertainty issue in software defect prediction utilizing a hybrid of ANFIS and turbulent flow of water optimization algorithm

During the development cycle of software projects, numerous defects and challenges have been identified, leading to prolonged project durations and escalated costs. As a result, both product delivery and defect tracking have become increasingly complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Recognizing the challenge of identifying every software defect, it is crucial to foresee potential consequences and strive for the production of high-quality products. The goal of software defect prediction (SDP) is to identify problematic locations within software code. This study presents the first experimental investigation utilizing the turbulent flow of water optimization (TFWO) in conjunction with the adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) to enhance SDP. The TFWO_ANFIS model is designed to address the uncertainties present in software features and predict defects with feasible accuracy. Data are divided randomly at the beginning of the model into training and testing sets to avoid the local optima and over-fitting issues. By applying the TFWO approach, it adjusts the ANFIS parameters during the SDP process. The proposed model, TFWO_ANFIS, outperforms other optimization algorithms commonly used in SDP, such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), gray wolf optimization (GWO), differential evolution (DE), ant colony optimization (ACO), standard ANFIS, and genetic algorithm (GA). This superiority is demonstrated through various evaluation metrics for four datasets, including standard deviation (SD) scores (0.3307, 0.2885, 0.3205, and 0.2929), mean square error (MSE) scores (0.1091, 0.0770, 0.1026, and 0.0850), root-mean-square error (RMSE) scores (0.3303, 0.2776, 0.3203, and 0.2926), mean bias error (MBE) scores (0.1281, 0.0860, 0.0931, and 0.2310), and accuracy scores (87.3%, 90.2%, 85.8%, and 89.2%), respectively, for the datasets KC2, PC3, KC1, and PC4. These datasets with different instances and features are obtained from an open platform called OPENML. Additionally, multiple evaluation metrics such as precision, sensitivity, confusion matrices, and specificity are employed to assess the model’s performance.

Enhancing IOT based software defect prediction in analytical data management using war strategy optimization and Kernel ELM

Enhancing IOT based software defect prediction in analytical data management using war strategy optimization and Kernel ELM