A Hybrid Multi-Filter Wrapper Feature Selection Method for Software Defect Predictors

Software Defect Prediction (SDP) is an approach used for identifying defect-prone software modules or components. It helps software engineer to optimally, allocate limited resources to defective software modules or components in the testing or maintenance phases of software development life cycle (SDLC). Nonetheless, the predictive performance of SDP models reckons largely on the quality of dataset utilized for training the predictive models. The high dimensionality of software metric features has been noted as a data quality problem which negatively affects the predictive performance of SDP models. Feature Selection (FS) is a well-known method for solving high dimensionality problem and can be divided into filter-based and wrapper-based methods. Filter-based FS has low computational cost, but the predictive performance of its classification algorithm on the filtered data cannot be guaranteed. On the contrary, wrapper-based FS have good predictive performance but with high computational cost and lack of generalizability. Therefore, this study proposes a hybrid multi-filter wrapper method for feature selection of relevant and irredundant features in software defect prediction. The proposed hybrid feature selection will be developed to take advantage of filter-filter and filter-wrapper relationships to give optimal feature subsets, reduce its evaluation cycle and subsequently improve SDP models overall predictive performance in terms of Accuracy, Precision and Recall values

Parameter tuning in KNN for software defect prediction: an empirical analysis

Software Defect Prediction (SDP) provides insights that can help software teams to allocate their limited resources in developing software systems. It predicts likely defective modules and helps avoid pitfalls that are associated with such modules. However, these insights may be inaccurate and unreliable if parameters of SDP models are not taken into consideration. In this study, the effect of parameter tuning on the k nearest neighbor (k-NN) in SDP was investigated. More specifically, the impact of varying and selecting optimal k value, the influence of distance weighting and the impact of distance functions on k-NN. An experiment was designed to investigate this problem in SDP over 6 software defect datasets. The experimental results revealed that k value should be greater than 1 (default) as the average RMSE values of k-NN when k>1(0.2727) is less than when k=1(default) (0.3296). In addition, the predictive performance of k-NN with distance weighing improved by 8.82% and 1.7% based on AUC and accuracy respectively. In terms of the distance function, kNN models based on Dilca distance function performed better than the Euclidean distance function (default distance function). Hence, we conclude that parameter tuning has a positive effect on the predictive performance of k-NN in SDP

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.