Hybrid Multi-Objective Grey Wolf Search Optimizer and Machine Learning Approach for Software Bug Prediction

Software bugs (or malfunctions) pose a serious threat to software developers with many known and unknown bugs that may be vulnerable to computer systems, demanding new methods, analysis, and techniques for efficient bug detection and repair of new unseen programs at a later stage. This chapter uses evolutionary grey wolf (GW) search optimization as a feature selection technique to improve classifier efficiency. It is also envisaged that software error detection would consider the nature of the error when repairing it for remedial action instead of simply finding it either faulty or non-defective. To address this problem, the authors use bug severity multi-class classification to build an efficient and robust prediction model using multilayer perceptron (MLP), logistic regression (LR), and random forest (RF) for bug severity classification. Both tests are performed on two software error datasets, namely Ant 1.7 and Tomcat.