A Comprehensive Investigation of the Role of Imbalanced Learning for Software Defect Prediction

National Natural Science Foundation of Chin

Software defect prediction: do different classifiers find the same defects?

Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.During the last 10 years, hundreds of different defect prediction models have been published. The performance of the classifiers used in these models is reported to be similar with models rarely performing above the predictive performance ceiling of about 80% recall. We investigate the individual defects that four classifiers predict and analyse the level of prediction uncertainty produced by these classifiers. We perform a sensitivity analysis to compare the performance of Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, RPart and SVM classifiers when predicting defects in NASA, open source and commercial datasets. The defect predictions that each classifier makes is captured in a confusion matrix and the prediction uncertainty of each classifier is compared. Despite similar predictive performance values for these four classifiers, each detects different sets of defects. Some classifiers are more consistent in predicting defects than others. Our results confirm that a unique subset of defects can be detected by specific classifiers. However, while some classifiers are consistent in the predictions they make, other classifiers vary in their predictions. Given our results, we conclude that classifier ensembles with decision-making strategies not based on majority voting are likely to perform best in defect prediction.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Absolute Correlation Weighted Naïve Bayes for Software Defect Prediction

The maintenance phase of the software project can be very expensive for the developer team and harmful to the users because some flawed software modules. It can be avoided by detecting defects as early as possible. Software defect prediction will provide an opportunity for the developer team to test modules or files that have a high probability defect. Naïve Bayes has been used to predict software defects. However, Naive Bayes assumes all attributes are equally important and are not related each other while, in fact, this assumption is not true in many cases. Absolute value of correlation coefficient has been proposed as weighting method to overcome Naïve Bayes assumptions. In this study, Absolute Correlation Weighted Naïve Bayes have been proposed. The results of parametric test on experiment results show that the proposed method improve the performance of Naïve Bayes for classifying defect-prone on software defect prediction

A New Improved Prediction of Software Defects Using Machine Learning-based Boosting Techniques with NASA Dataset

Predicting when and where bugs will appear in software may assist improve quality and save on software testing expenses. Predicting bugs in individual modules of software by utilizing machine learning methods. There are, however, two major problems with the software defect prediction dataset: Social stratification (there are many fewer faulty modules than non-defective ones), and noisy characteristics (a result of irrelevant features) that make accurate predictions difficult. The performance of the machine learning model will suffer greatly if these two issues arise. Overfitting will occur, and biassed classification findings will be the end consequence. In this research, we suggest using machine learning approaches to enhance the usefulness of the CatBoost and Gradient Boost classifiers while predicting software flaws. Both the Random Over Sampler and Mutual info classification methods address the class imbalance and feature selection issues inherent in software fault prediction. Eleven datasets from NASA's data repository, "Promise," were utilised in this study. Using 10-fold cross-validation, we classified these 11 datasets and found that our suggested technique outperformed the baseline by a significant margin. The proposed methods have been evaluated based on their abilities to anticipate software defects using the most important indices available: Accuracy, Precision, Recall, F1 score, ROC values, RMSE, MSE, and MAE parameters. For all 11 datasets evaluated, the suggested methods outperform baseline classifiers by a significant margin. We tested our model to other methods of flaw identification and found that it outperformed them all. The computational detection rate of the suggested model is higher than that of conventional models, as shown by the experiments.

Weakly Supervised-Based Oversampling for High Imbalance and High Dimensionality Data Classification

With the abundance of industrial datasets, imbalanced classification has become a common problem in several application domains. Oversampling is an effective method to solve imbalanced classification. One of the main challenges of the existing oversampling methods is to accurately label the new synthetic samples. Inaccurate labels of the synthetic samples would distort the distribution of the dataset and possibly worsen the classification performance. This paper introduces the idea of weakly supervised learning to handle the inaccurate labeling of synthetic samples caused by traditional oversampling methods. Graph semi-supervised SMOTE is developed to improve the credibility of the synthetic samples' labels. In addition, we propose cost-sensitive neighborhood components analysis for high dimensional datasets and bootstrap based ensemble framework for highly imbalanced datasets. The proposed method has achieved good classification performance on 8 synthetic datasets and 3 real-world datasets, especially for high imbalance and high dimensionality problems. The average performances and robustness are better than the benchmark methods