Title: An enhanced software defect prediction model with multiple metrics and learners

Authors: Shihai Wang; He Ping; Li Zelin

Addresses: The School of Reliability and System Engineering, Science and Technology on Reliability and Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Beihang University, 37 XueYuan Road, HaiDian District, Beijing 100191, China ' The School of Reliability and System Engineering, Science and Technology on Reliability and Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Beihang University, 37 XueYuan Road, HaiDian District, Beijing 100191, China ' The School of Reliability and System Engineering, Science and Technology on Reliability and Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Beihang University, 37 XueYuan Road, HaiDian District, Beijing 100191, China

Abstract: Defect prediction is a critical technique for achieving high reliability software. Defect prediction models based on software metrics are able to predict which modules are fault-prone, which in turn. The prediction results would make the software developers to pay more attentions to these high-risk modules. For software defect prediction modelling, machine learning techniques have been widely employed. Model selection problem is always a challenge for generating an efficient predictor with a satisfied performance which is also always difficult to achieve. In this paper, a software defect prediction modelling framework based on multi-metric space and multi-type learning models is proposed. Different types of component classifiers and different software metric sets are used to build a software defect prediction ensemble model with the increment on the diversity of ensemble learning as far as possible. The proposed model is fully investigated by using a set of real project data from NASA MDP, the experimental results reveal that the model effectively improve the generalisation performance and the predictive accuracy.

Keywords: software defects; defect prediction; fault proneness; ensemble learning; software metrics; prediction modelling; software reliability; software development; software faults; software errors.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2016.074711

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2016 Vol.22 No.3, pp.358 - 371

Received: 07 Nov 2013
Accepted: 29 Jun 2014
Published online: 16 Feb 2016 *

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