Improving with Hybrid Feature Selection in Software Defect Prediction

Abstract

Software defect prediction (SDP) is used to identify defects in software modules that can be a challenge in software development. This research focuses on the problems that occur in Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), such as the problem of noisy attributes, high-dimensional data, and premature convergence. So this research focuses on improving PSO performance by using feature selection methods with hybrid techniques to overcome these problems. The feature selection techniques used are Filter and Wrapper. The methods used are Chi-Square (CS), Correlation-Based Feature Selection (CFS), and Forward Selection (FS) because feature selection methods have been proven to overcome data dimensionality problems and eliminate noisy attributes. Feature selection is often used by some researchers to overcome these problems, because these methods have an important function in the process of reducing data dimensions and eliminating uncorrelated attributes that can cause noisy. Naive Bayes algorithm is used to support the process of determining the most optimal class. Performance evaluation will use AUC with an alpha value of 0.050. This hybrid feature selection technique brings significant improvement to PSO performance with a much lower AUC value of 0.00342. Comparison of the significance of AUC with other combinations shows the value of FS PSO of 0.02535, CFS FS PSO of 0.00180, and CS FS PSO of 0.01186. The method in this study contributes to improving PSO in the SDP domain by significantly increasing the AUC value. Therefore, this study highlights the potential of feature selection with hybrid techniques to improve PSO performance in SDP.

Keywords

• software defect prediction
• particle swarm optimization
• feature selection
• filter
• wrapper
• naive bayes