Using the Support Vector Machine as a Classification Method for Software Defect Prediction with Static Code Metrics

AbstractPredicting the defect-prone modules when the previous defect labels of modules are limited is a challenging problem encountered in the software industry. Supervised classification approaches cannot build high-performance prediction models with few defect data, leading to the need for new methods, techniques, and tools. One solution is to combine labeled data points with unlabeled data points during learning phase. Semi-supervised classification methods use not only labeled data points but also unlabeled ones to improve the generalization capability. In this study, we evaluated four semi-supervised classification methods for semi-supervised defect prediction. Low-density separation (LDS), support vector machine (SVM), expectation-maximization (EM-SEMI), and class mass normalization (CMN) methods have been investigated on NASA data sets, which are CM1, KC1, KC2, and PC1. Experimental results showed that SVM and LDS algorithms outperform CMN and EM-SEMI algorithms. In addition, LDS algorithm performs much better than SVM when the data set is large. In this study, the LDS-based prediction approach is suggested for software defect prediction when there are limited fault data.

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A Novel Effort Measure Method for Effort-Aware Just-in-Time Software Defect Prediction

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering ◽

10.1142/s0218194021500364 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 31 (08) ◽

pp. 1145-1169

Author(s):

Liqiong Chen ◽

Shilong Song ◽

Can Wang

Keyword(s):

Prediction Model ◽

Defect Prediction ◽

Software Systems ◽

Support Vector ◽

Just In Time ◽

Software Defect Prediction ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Software Defect ◽

Code Changes ◽

The Cost

Just-in-time software defect prediction (JIT-SDP) is a fine-grained software defect prediction technology, which aims to identify the defective code changes in software systems. Effort-aware software defect prediction is a software defect prediction technology that takes into consideration the cost of code inspection, which can find more defective code changes in limited test resources. The traditional effort-aware defect prediction model mainly measures the effort based on the number of lines of code (LOC) and rarely considers additional factors. This paper proposes a novel effort measure method called Multi-Metric Joint Calculation (MMJC). When measuring the effort, MMJC takes into account not only LOC, but also the distribution of modified code across different files (Entropy), the number of developers that changed the files (NDEV) and the developer experience (EXP). In the simulation experiment, MMJC is combined with Linear Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, LightGBM, Support Vector Machine and Neural Network, respectively, to build the software defect prediction model. Several comparative experiments are conducted between the models based on MMJC and baseline models. The results show that indicators ACC and [Formula: see text] of the models based on MMJC are improved by 35.3% and 15.9% on average in the three verification scenarios, respectively, compared with the baseline models.

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