Rand-Index Target Projective Gradient Deep Belief Network for Software Fault Prediction

Abstract

Predicting defective software modules before testing is a valuable operation that reduces time and cost of software testing. Source code fault prediction plays a vital role in improving software quality that effectively assists in optimization testing resource allocation. Several machine learning and ensemble learning techniques has been extensively evolved over the recent few years to predict defect at an early stage. These techniques made predictions based on historical defect data, the software metrics. Nevertheless, the time efficient and accurate fault predictions are the major challenging tasks that yet have to be addressed. In order to ensure accurate software fault prediction, a method called Rand-Index Target Projective Gradient Deep Belief Network (RTPGDBN) is designed. The proposed RTPGDBN method comprises of three processes namely acquiring JAVA packages, software metric selection and classification. First, the number of JAVA packages is used as input from the dataset. Second with the JAVA packages obtained as input, Rand similarity indexive target projection function is applied for selecting the most significant software metrics in order to minimize time complexity of fault prediction. Third, with the selected metrics, classification is performed using Tversky Gradient Deep Belief neural network. Also, gradient descent function is applied to minimize classification error, therefore ensuring accurate software fault classification results obtained at the output layer. Experimental setup of proposed RPGDDBN and existing methods are implemented in Java language and the dataset collected from smell prediction replication package. Performance analysis is carried out with different quantitative metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, and time complexity and space complexity. Through extensive experiments on repository data, experimental results indicate that our RPGDDBN method outperforms two state-of-the-art defect detection methods in terms of different performance metrics.