Software Defect Prediction Method Based on Stable Learning

The purpose of software defect prediction is to identify defect-prone code modules to assist software quality assurance teams with the appropriate allocation of resources and labor.In previous software defect prediction studies,transfer learning was effective in solving the problem of inconsistent project data distribution.However,target projects often lack sufficient data,which affects the performance of the transfer learning model.In addition,the presence of uncorrelated features between projects can decrease the prediction accuracy of the transfer learning model.To address these problems,this article propose a software defect prediction method based on stable learning(SDP-SL)that combines code visualization techniques and residual networks.This method first transforms code files into code images using code visualization techniques and then constructs a defect prediction model based on these code images.During the model training process,target project data are not required as prior knowledge.Following the principles of stable learning,this paper dynamically adjusted the weights of source project samples to eliminate dependencies between features,thereby capturing the“invariance mechanism”within the data.This approach explores the genuine relationship between code defect features and labels,thereby enhancing defect prediction performance.To evaluate the performance of SDP-SL,this article conducted comparative experiments on 10 open-source projects in the PROMISE dataset.The experimental results demonstrated that in terms of the F-measure,the proposed SDP-SL method outperformed other within-project defect prediction methods by 2.11%-44.03%.In cross-project defect prediction,the SDP-SL method provided an improvement of 5.89%-25.46% in prediction performance compared to other cross-project defect prediction methods.Therefore,SDP-SL can effectively enhance within-and cross-project defect predictions.

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

Cross-Project Defect Prediction(CPDP)is a method that utilizes historical data from other source projects to train predictive models for defect prediction in the target project.However,existing CPDP methods only consider linear correlations between features(indicators)of the source and target projects.These models are not capable of evaluating non-linear correlations between features when they exist,for example,when there are differences in data distributions between the source and target projects.As a result,the performance of such CPDP models is compromised.In this paper,this paper proposes a novel CPDP method based on Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique(SMOTE)and Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis(DCCA),referred to as S-DCCA.Canonical Correlation Analysis(CCA)is employed to address the issue of non-linear correlations between features of the source and target projects.S-DCCA extends CCA by incorporating the MlpNet model for feature extraction from the dataset.The redundant features are then eliminated by maximizing the correlated feature subset using the CCA loss function.Finally,cross-project defect prediction is achieved through the application of the SMOTE data sampling technique.Area Under Curve(AUC)and F1 scores(F1)are used as evaluation metrics.This paper conducted experiments on 27 projects from four public datasets to validate the proposed method.The results demonstrate that,on average,our method outperforms all baseline approaches by at least 1.2%in AUC and 5.5%in F1 score.This indicates that the proposed method exhibits favorable performance characteristics.

Software Defect Prediction Using Hybrid Machine Learning Techniques: A Comparative Study

When a customer uses the software, then it is possible to occur defects that can be removed in the updated versions of the software. Hence, in the present work, a robust examination of cross-project software defect prediction is elaborated through an innovative hybrid machine learning framework. The proposed technique combines an advanced deep neural network architecture with ensemble models such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and XGBoost. The study evaluates the performance by considering multiple software projects like CM1, JM1, KC1, and PC1 using datasets from the PROMISE Software Engineering Repository. The three hybrid models that are compared are Hybrid Model-1 (SVM, RandomForest, XGBoost, Neural Network), Hybrid Model-2 (GradientBoosting, DecisionTree, LogisticRegression, Neural Network), and Hybrid Model-3 (KNeighbors, GaussianNB, Support Vector Classification (SVC), Neural Network), and the Hybrid Model 3 surpasses the others in terms of recall, F1-score, accuracy, ROC AUC, and precision. The presented work offers valuable insights into the effectiveness of hybrid techniques for cross-project defect prediction, providing a comparative perspective on early defect identification and mitigation strategies. .

Graph-Based Feature Learning for Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction

Cross-project software defect prediction(CPDP)aims to enhance defect prediction in target projects with limited or no historical data by leveraging information from related source projects.The existing CPDP approaches rely on static metrics or dynamic syntactic features,which have shown limited effectiveness in CPDP due to their inability to capture higher-level system properties,such as complex design patterns,relationships between multiple functions,and dependencies in different software projects,that are important for CPDP.This paper introduces a novel approach,a graph-based feature learning model for CPDP(GB-CPDP),that utilizes NetworkX to extract features and learn representations of program entities from control flow graphs(CFGs)and data dependency graphs(DDGs).These graphs capture the structural and data dependencies within the source code.The proposed approach employs Node2Vec to transform CFGs and DDGs into numerical vectors and leverages Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM)networks to learn predictive models.The process involves graph construction,feature learning through graph embedding and LSTM,and defect prediction.Experimental evaluation using nine open-source Java projects from the PROMISE dataset demonstrates that GB-CPDP outperforms state-of-the-art CPDP methods in terms of F1-measure and Area Under the Curve(AUC).The results showcase the effectiveness of GB-CPDP in improving the performance of cross-project defect prediction.

Data and Ensemble Machine Learning Fusion Based Intelligent Software Defect Prediction System

The software engineering field has long focused on creating high-quality software despite limited resources.Detecting defects before the testing stage of software development can enable quality assurance engineers to con-centrate on problematic modules rather than all the modules.This approach can enhance the quality of the final product while lowering development costs.Identifying defective modules early on can allow for early corrections and ensure the timely delivery of a high-quality product that satisfies customers and instills greater confidence in the development team.This process is known as software defect prediction,and it can improve end-product quality while reducing the cost of testing and maintenance.This study proposes a software defect prediction system that utilizes data fusion,feature selection,and ensemble machine learning fusion techniques.A novel filter-based metric selection technique is proposed in the framework to select the optimum features.A three-step nested approach is presented for predicting defective modules to achieve high accuracy.In the first step,three supervised machine learning techniques,including Decision Tree,Support Vector Machines,and Naïve Bayes,are used to detect faulty modules.The second step involves integrating the predictive accuracy of these classification techniques through three ensemble machine-learning methods:Bagging,Voting,and Stacking.Finally,in the third step,a fuzzy logic technique is employed to integrate the predictive accuracy of the ensemble machine learning techniques.The experiments are performed on a fused software defect dataset to ensure that the developed fused ensemble model can perform effectively on diverse datasets.Five NASA datasets are integrated to create the fused dataset:MW1,PC1,PC3,PC4,and CM1.According to the results,the proposed system exhibited superior performance to other advanced techniques for predicting software defects,achieving a remarkable accuracy rate of 92.08%.

Software Defect Prediction Based Ensemble Approach

Software systems have grown significantly and in complexity.As a result of these qualities,preventing software faults is extremely difficult.Software defect prediction(SDP)can assist developers in finding potential bugs and reducing maintenance costs.When it comes to lowering software costs and assuring software quality,SDP plays a critical role in software development.As a result,automatically forecasting the number of errors in software modules is important,and it may assist developers in allocating limited resources more efficiently.Several methods for detecting and addressing such flaws at a low cost have been offered.These approaches,on the other hand,need to be significantly improved in terms of performance.Therefore in this paper,two deep learning(DL)models Multilayer preceptor(MLP)and deep neural network(DNN)are proposed.The proposed approaches combine the newly established Whale optimization algorithm(WOA)with the complementary Firefly algorithm(FA)to establish the emphasized metaheuristic search EMWS algorithm,which selects fewer but closely related representative features.To find the best-implemented classifier in terms of prediction achievement measurement factor,classifiers were applied to five PROMISE repository datasets.When compared to existing methods,the proposed technique for SDP outperforms,with 0.91%for the JM1 dataset,0.98%accuracy for the KC2 dataset,0.91%accuracy for the PC1 dataset,0.93%accuracy for the MC2 dataset,and 0.92%accuracy for KC3.

Defect Prediction Using Akaike and Bayesian Information Criterion

Data available in software engineering for many applications contains variability and it is not possible to say which variable helps in the process of the prediction.Most of the work present in software defect prediction is focused on the selection of best prediction techniques.For this purpose,deep learning and ensemble models have shown promising results.In contrast,there are very few researches that deals with cleaning the training data and selection of best parameter values from the data.Sometimes data available for training the models have high variability and this variability may cause a decrease in model accuracy.To deal with this problem we used the Akaike information criterion(AIC)and the Bayesian information criterion(BIC)for selection of the best variables to train the model.A simple ANN model with one input,one output and two hidden layers was used for the training instead of a very deep and complex model.AIC and BIC values are calculated and combination for minimum AIC and BIC values to be selected for the best model.At first,variables were narrowed down to a smaller number using correlation values.Then subsets for all the possible variable combinations were formed.In the end,an artificial neural network(ANN)model was trained for each subset and the best model was selected on the basis of the smallest AIC and BIC value.It was found that combination of only two variables’ns and entropy are best for software defect prediction as it gives minimum AIC and BIC values.While,nm and npt is the worst combination and gives maximum AIC and BIC values.

Within-Project and Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction Based on Improved Transfer Naive Bayes Algorithm

With the continuous expansion of software scale,software update and maintenance have become more and more important.However,frequent software code updates will make the software more likely to introduce new defects.So how to predict the defects quickly and accurately on the software change has become an important problem for software developers.Current defect prediction methods often cannot reflect the feature information of the defect comprehensively,and the detection effect is not ideal enough.Therefore,we propose a novel defect prediction model named ITNB(Improved Transfer Naive Bayes)based on improved transfer Naive Bayesian algorithm in this paper,which mainly considers the following two aspects:(1)Considering that the edge data of the test set may affect the similarity calculation and final prediction result,we remove the edge data of the test set when calculating the data similarity between the training set and the test set;(2)Considering that each feature dimension has different effects on defect prediction,we construct the calculation formula of training data weight based on feature dimension weight and data gravity,and then calculate the prior probability and the conditional probability of training data from the weight information,so as to construct the weighted bayesian classifier for software defect prediction.To evaluate the performance of the ITNB model,we use six datasets from large open source projects,namely Bugzilla,Columba,Mozilla,JDT,Platform and PostgreSQL.We compare the ITNB model with the transfer Naive Bayesian(TNB)model.The experimental results show that our ITNB model can achieve better results than the TNB model in terms of accurary,precision and pd for within-project and cross-project defect prediction.

KAEA: A Novel Three-Stage Ensemble Model for Software Defect Prediction

Software defect prediction is a research hotspot in the field of software engineering.However,due to the limitations of current machine learning algorithms,we can’t achieve good effect for defect prediction by only using machine learning algorithms.In previous studies,some researchers used extreme learning machine(ELM)to conduct defect prediction.However,the initial weights and biases of the ELM are determined randomly,which reduces the prediction performance of ELM.Motivated by the idea of search based software engineering,we propose a novel software defect prediction model named KAEA based on kernel principal component analysis(KPCA),adaptive genetic algorithm,extreme learning machine and Adaboost algorithm,which has three main advantages:(1)KPCA can extract optimal representative features by leveraging a nonlinear mapping function;(2)We leverage adaptive genetic algorithm to optimize the initial weights and biases of ELM,so as to improve the generalization ability and prediction capacity of ELM;(3)We use the Adaboost algorithm to integrate multiple ELM basic predictors optimized by adaptive genetic algorithm into a strong predictor,which can further improve the effect of defect prediction.To effectively evaluate the performance of KAEA,we use eleven datasets from large open source projects,and compare the KAEA with four machine learning basic classifiers,ELM and its three variants.The experimental results show that KAEA is superior to these baseline models in most cases.

Software Defect Prediction Based on Stacked Contractive Autoencoder and Multi-Objective Optimization

Software defect prediction plays an important role in software quality assurance.However,the performance of the prediction model is susceptible to the irrelevant and redundant features.In addition,previous studies mostly regard software defect prediction as a single objective optimization problem,and multi-objective software defect prediction has not been thoroughly investigated.For the above two reasons,we propose the following solutions in this paper:(1)we leverage an advanced deep neural network-Stacked Contractive AutoEncoder(SCAE)to extract the robust deep semantic features from the original defect features,which has stronger discrimination capacity for different classes(defective or non-defective).(2)we propose a novel multi-objective defect prediction model named SMONGE that utilizes the Multi-Objective NSGAII algorithm to optimize the advanced neural network-Extreme learning machine(ELM)based on state-of-the-art Pareto optimal solutions according to the features extracted by SCAE.We mainly consider two objectives.One objective is to maximize the performance of ELM,which refers to the benefit of the SMONGE model.Another objective is to minimize the output weight norm of ELM,which is related to the cost of the SMONGE model.We compare the SCAE with six state-of-the-art feature extraction methods and compare the SMONGE model with multiple baseline models that contain four classic defect predictors and the MONGE model without SCAE across 20 open source software projects.The experimental results verify that the superiority of SCAE and SMONGE on seven evaluation metrics.

RFC:a feature selection algorithm for software defect prediction

Software defect prediction(SDP)is used to perform the statistical analysis of historical defect data to find out the distribution rule of historical defects,so as to effectively predict defects in the new software.However,there are redundant and irrelevant features in the software defect datasets affecting the performance of defect predictors.In order to identify and remove the redundant and irrelevant features in software defect datasets,we propose ReliefF-based clustering(RFC),a clusterbased feature selection algorithm.Then,the correlation between features is calculated based on the symmetric uncertainty.According to the correlation degree,RFC partitions features into k clusters based on the k-medoids algorithm,and finally selects the representative features from each cluster to form the final feature subset.In the experiments,we compare the proposed RFC with classical feature selection algorithms on nine National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA)software defect prediction datasets in terms of area under curve(AUC)and Fvalue.The experimental results show that RFC can effectively improve the performance of SDP.

Software Defect Prediction Harnessing on Multi 1-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network Structure

Developing successful software with no defects is one of the main goals of software projects.In order to provide a software project with the anticipated software quality,the prediction of software defects plays a vital role.Machine learning,and particularly deep learning,have been advocated for predicting software defects,however both suffer from inadequate accuracy,overfitting,and complicated structure.In this paper,we aim to address such issues in predicting software defects.We propose a novel structure of 1-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network(1D-CNN),a deep learning architecture to extract useful knowledge,identifying and modelling the knowledge in the data sequence,reduce overfitting,and finally,predict whether the units of code are defects prone.We design large-scale empirical studies to reveal the proposed model’s effectiveness by comparing four established traditional machine learning baseline models and four state-of-the-art baselines in software defect prediction based on the NASA datasets.The experimental results demonstrate that in terms of f-measure,an optimal and modest 1DCNN with a dropout layer outperforms baseline and state-of-the-art models by 66.79%and 23.88%,respectively,in ways that minimize overfitting and improving prediction performance for software defects.According to the results,1D-CNN seems to be successful in predicting software defects and may be applied and adopted for a practical problem in software engineering.This,in turn,could lead to saving software development resources and producing more reliable software.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Based on Discriminative Subspace Learning for Cross-Project Defect Prediction

:Cross-project defect prediction(CPDP)aims to predict the defects on target project by using a prediction model built on source projects.The main problem in CPDP is the huge distribution gap between the source project and the target project,which prevents the prediction model from performing well.Most existing methods overlook the class discrimination of the learned features.Seeking an effective transferable model from the source project to the target project for CPDP is challenging.In this paper,we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation based on the discriminative subspace learning(DSL)approach for CPDP.DSL treats the data from two projects as being from two domains and maps the data into a common feature space.It employs crossdomain alignment with discriminative information from different projects to reduce the distribution difference of the data between different projects and incorporates the class discriminative information.Specifically,DSL first utilizes subspace learning based domain adaptation to reduce the distribution gap of data between different projects.Then,it makes full use of the class label information of the source project and transfers the discrimination ability of the source project to the target project in the common space.Comprehensive experiments on five projects verify that DSL can build an effective prediction model and improve the performance over the related competing methods by at least 7.10%and 11.08%in terms of G-measure and AUC.

Software Defect Prediction Based on Non-Linear Manifold Learning and Hybrid Deep Learning Techniques

Software defect prediction plays a very important role in software quality assurance,which aims to inspect as many potentially defect-prone software modules as possible.However,the performance of the prediction model is susceptible to high dimensionality of the dataset that contains irrelevant and redundant features.In addition,software metrics for software defect prediction are almost entirely traditional features compared to the deep semantic feature representation from deep learning techniques.To address these two issues,we propose the following two solutions in this paper:(1)We leverage a novel non-linear manifold learning method-SOINN Landmark Isomap(SL-Isomap)to extract the representative features by selecting automatically the reasonable number and position of landmarks,which can reveal the complex intrinsic structure hidden behind the defect data.(2)We propose a novel defect prediction model named DLDD based on hybrid deep learning techniques,which leverages denoising autoencoder to learn true input features that are not contaminated by noise,and utilizes deep neural network to learn the abstract deep semantic features.We combine the squared error loss function of denoising autoencoder with the cross entropy loss function of deep neural network to achieve the best prediction performance by adjusting a hyperparameter.We compare the SL-Isomap with seven state-of-the-art feature extraction methods and compare the DLDD model with six baseline models across 20 open source software projects.The experimental results verify that the superiority of SL-Isomap and DLDD on four evaluation indicators.

Compiler IR-Based Program Encoding Method for Software Defect Prediction

With the continuous expansion of software applications,people’s requirements for software quality are increasing.Software defect prediction is an important technology to improve software quality.It often encodes the software into several features and applies the machine learning method to build defect prediction classifiers,which can estimate the software areas is clean or buggy.However,the current encoding methods are mainly based on the traditional manual features or the AST of source code.Traditional manual features are difficult to reflect the deep semantics of programs,and there is a lot of noise information in AST,which affects the expression of semantic features.To overcome the above deficiencies,we combined with the Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN)and proposed a novel compiler Intermediate Representation(IR)based program encoding method for software defect prediction(CIR-CNN).Specifically,our program encoding method is based on the compiler IR,which can eliminate a large amount of noise information in the syntax structure of the source code and facilitate the acquisition of more accurate semantic information.Secondly,with the help of data flow analysis,a Data Dependency Graph(DDG)is constructed on the compiler IR,which helps to capture the deeper semantic information of the program.Finally,we use the widely used CNN model to build a software defect prediction model,which can increase the adaptive ability of the method.To evaluate the performance of the CIR-CNN,we use seven projects from PROMISE datasets to set up comparative experiments.The experiments results show that,in WPDP,with our CIR-CNN method,the prediction accuracy was improved by 12%for the AST-encoded CNN-based model and by 20.9%for the traditional features-based LR model,respectively.And in CPDP,the AST-encoded DBNbased model was improved by 9.1%and the traditional features-based TCA+model by 19.2%,respectively.

Nonparametric Statistical Feature Scaling Based Quadratic Regressive Convolution Deep Neural Network for Software Fault Prediction

The development of defect prediction plays a significant role in improving software quality. Such predictions are used to identify defective modules before the testing and to minimize the time and cost. The software with defects negatively impacts operational costs and finally affects customer satisfaction. Numerous approaches exist to predict software defects. However, the timely and accurate software bugs are the major challenging issues. To improve the timely and accurate software defect prediction, a novel technique called Nonparametric Statistical feature scaled QuAdratic regressive convolution Deep nEural Network (SQADEN) is introduced. The proposed SQADEN technique mainly includes two major processes namely metric or feature selection and classification. First, the SQADEN uses the nonparametric statistical Torgerson–Gower scaling technique for identifying the relevant software metrics by measuring the similarity using the dice coefficient. The feature selection process is used to minimize the time complexity of software fault prediction. With the selected metrics, software fault perdition with the help of the Quadratic Censored regressive convolution deep neural network-based classification. The deep learning classifier analyzes the training and testing samples using the contingency correlation coefficient. The softstep activation function is used to provide the final fault prediction results. To minimize the error, the Nelder–Mead method is applied to solve non-linear least-squares problems. Finally, accurate classification results with a minimum error are obtained at the output layer. Experimental evaluation is carried out with different quantitative metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, and time complexity. The analyzed results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed SQADEN technique with maximum accuracy, sensitivity and specificity by 3%, 3%, 2% and 3% and minimum time and space by 13% and 15% when compared with the two state-of-the-art methods.

A Cluster Based Feature Selection Method for Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction

Cross-project defect prediction （CPDP） uses the labeled data from external source software projects to com- pensate the shortage of useful data in the target project, in order to build a meaningful classification model. However, the distribution gap between software features extracted from the source and the target projects may be too large to make the mixed data useful for training. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based novel method FeSCH （Feature Selection Using Clusters of Hybrid-Data） to alleviate the distribution differences by feature selection. FeSCH includes two phases. Tile feature clustering phase clusters features using a density-based clustering method, and the feature selection phase selects features from each cluster using a ranking strategy. For CPDP, we design three different heuristic ranking strategies in the second phase. To investigate the prediction performance of FeSCH, we design experiments based on real-world software projects, and study the effects of design options in FeSCH （such as ranking strategy, feature selection ratio, and classifiers）. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of FeSCH. Firstly, compared with the state-of-the-art baseline methods, FeSCH achieves better performance and its performance is less affected by the classifiers used. Secondly, FeSCH enhances the performance by effectively selecting features across feature categories, and provides guidelines for selecting useful features for defect prediction.

Software Defect Prediction Using Fuzzy Integral Fusion Based on GA-FM

The fuzzy measure and fuzzy integral are applied to the classification of software defects in this paper. The fuzzy measure of software attributes and attributes＇ sets are treated by genetic algorithm, and then software attributes are fused by the Choquet fuzzy integral algorithm. Finally, the class labels of soft- ware modules can be output. Experimental results have shown that there are interactions between characteristic attributes of software modules, and also proved that the fuzzy integral fusing method using Fuzzy Measure based on Genetic Algorithm （GA-FM） can significantly improve the accuracy for software defect prediction.

A Novel Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction Algorithm Based on Transfer Learning

Software Defect Prediction(SDP) technology is an effective tool for improving software system quality that has attracted much attention in recent years.However,the prediction of cross-project data remains a challenge for the traditional SDP method due to the different distributions of the training and testing datasets.Another major difficulty is the class imbalance issue that must be addressed in Cross-Project Defect Prediction(CPDP).In this work,we propose a transfer-leaning algorithm(TSboostDF) that considers both knowledge transfer and class imbalance for CPDP.The experimental results demonstrate that the performance achieved by TSboostDF is better than those of existing CPDP methods.

Combined classifier for cross-project defect prediction： an extended empirical study

To facilitate developers in effective allocation of their testing and debugging efforts, many software defect prediction techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques can be used to predict classes that are more likely to be buggy based on the past history of classes, methods, or certain other code elements. These techniques are effective provided that a sufficient amount of data is available to train a prediction model. However, sufficient training data are rarely available for new software projects. To resolve this problem, cross-project defect prediction, which transfers a prediction model trained using data from one project to another, was proposed and is regarded as a new challenge in the area of defect prediction. Thus far, only a few cross-project defect prediction techniques have been proposed. To advance the state of the art, in this study, we investigated seven composite algorithms that integrate multiple machine learning classifiers to improve cross-project defect prediction. To evaluate the performance of the composite algorithms, we performed experiments on 10 open-source software systems from the PROMISE repository, which contain a total of 5,305 instances labeled as defective or clean. We compared the composite algorithms with the combined defect predictor where logistic regression is used as the meta classification algorithm （CODEPLogistic）, which is the most recent cross-project defect prediction algorithm in terms of two standard evaluation metrics： cost effectiveness and F-measure. Our experimental results show that several algorithms outperform CODEPLogistic：Maximum voting shows the best performance in terms of F-measure and its average F-measure is superior to that of CODEPLogistic by 36.88%. Bootstrap aggregation （Bagging J48） shows the best performance in terms of cost effectiveness and its average cost effectiveness is superior to that of CODEPLogistic by 15.34%.