Shape-based defect classification for Non Destructive Testing

The aim of this work is to classify the aerospace structure defects detected by eddy current non-destructive testing. The proposed method is based on the assumption that the defect is bound to the reaction of the probe coil impedance during the test. Impedance plane analysis is used to extract a feature vector from the shape of the coil impedance in the complex plane, through the use of some geometric parameters. Shape recognition is tested with three different machine-learning based classifiers: decision trees, neural networks and Naive Bayes. The performance of the proposed detection system are measured in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision and Matthews correlation coefficient. Several experiments are performed on dataset of eddy current signal samples for aircraft structures. The obtained results demonstrate the usefulness of our approach and the competiveness against existing descriptors.Comment: 5 pages, IEEE International Worksho

Rough set theory applied to pattern recognition of partial discharge in noise affected cable data

This paper presents an effective, Rough Set (RS) based, pattern recognition method for rejecting interference signals and recognising Partial Discharge (PD) signals from different sources. Firstly, RS theory is presented in terms of Information System, Lower and Upper Approximation, Signal Discretisation, Attribute Reduction and a flowchart of the RS based pattern recognition method. Secondly, PD testing of five types of artificial defect in ethylene-propylene rubber (EPR) cable is carried out and data pre-processing and feature extraction are employed to separate PD and interference signals. Thirdly, the RS based PD signal recognition method is applied to 4000 samples and is proven to have 99% accuracy. Fourthly, the RS based PD recognition method is applied to signals from five different sources and an accuracy of more than 93% is attained when a combination of signal discretisation and attribute reduction methods are applied. Finally, Back-propagation Neural Network (BPNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) methods are studied and compared with the developed method. The proposed RS method is proven to have higher accuracy than SVM and BPNN and can be applied for on-line PD monitoring of cable systems after training with valid sample data

Towards Automated Performance Bug Identification in Python

Context: Software performance is a critical non-functional requirement, appearing in many fields such as mission critical applications, financial, and real time systems. In this work we focused on early detection of performance bugs; our software under study was a real time system used in the advertisement/marketing domain. Goal: Find a simple and easy to implement solution, predicting performance bugs. Method: We built several models using four machine learning methods, commonly used for defect prediction: C4.5 Decision Trees, Na\"{\i}ve Bayes, Bayesian Networks, and Logistic Regression. Results: Our empirical results show that a C4.5 model, using lines of code changed, file's age and size as explanatory variables, can be used to predict performance bugs (recall=0.73, accuracy=0.85, and precision=0.96). We show that reducing the number of changes delivered on a commit, can decrease the chance of performance bug injection. Conclusions: We believe that our approach can help practitioners to eliminate performance bugs early in the development cycle. Our results are also of interest to theoreticians, establishing a link between functional bugs and (non-functional) performance bugs, and explicitly showing that attributes used for prediction of functional bugs can be used for prediction of performance bugs