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A new weighted naive Bayes method based on information diffusion for software defect prediction

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Abstract

Software defect prediction (SDP) plays a significant part in identifying the most defect-prone modules before software testing and allocating limited testing resources. One of the most commonly used classifiers in SDP is naive Bayes (NB). Despite the simplicity of the NB classifier, it can often perform better than more complicated classification models. In NB, the features are assumed to be equally important, and the numeric features are assumed to have a normal distribution. However, the features often do not contribute equivalently to the classification, and they usually do not have a normal distribution after performing a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test; this may harm the performance of the NB classifier. Therefore, this paper proposes a new weighted naive Bayes method based on information diffusion (WNB-ID) for SDP. More specifically, for the equal importance assumption, we investigate six weight assignment methods for setting the feature weights and then choose the most suitable one based on the F-measure. For the normal distribution assumption, we apply the information diffusion model (IDM) to compute the probability density of each feature instead of the acquiescent probability density function of the normal distribution. We carry out experiments on 10 software defect data sets of three types of projects in three different programming languages provided by the PROMISE repository. Several well-known classifiers and ensemble methods are included for comparison. The final experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61702544) and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China (Grant No. BK20160769).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Huaiyin Normal University, Huaian, 223300, China

    Haijin Ji

  2. Command & Control Engineering College, Army Engineering University of PLA, Nanjing, 210007, China

    Haijin Ji, Song Huang, Yaning Wu, Zhanwei Hui & Changyou Zheng

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Ji, H., Huang, S., Wu, Y. et al. A new weighted naive Bayes method based on information diffusion for software defect prediction. Software Qual J 27, 923–968 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-018-9436-4

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