The Influence of Deep Learning Algorithms Factors in Software Fault Prediction

Abstract

The discovery of software faults at early stages plays an important role in improving software quality; reduce the costs, time, and effort that should be spent on software development. Machine learning (ML) have been widely used in the software faults prediction (SFP), ML algorithms provide varying results in terms of predicting software fault. Deep learning achieves remarkable performance in various areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and other fields. In this study, two deep learning algorithms are studied, Multi-layer perceptron's (MLPs) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to address the factors that might have an influence on the performance of both algorithms. The experiment results show how modifying parameters is directly affecting the resulting improvement, these parameters are manipulated until the optimal number for each of them is reached. Moreover, the experiments show that the effect of modifying parameters had an important role in prediction performance, which reached a high rate in comparison with the traditional ML algorithm. To validate our assumptions, the experiments are conducted on four common NASA datasets. The result shows how the addressed factors might increase or decrease the fault detection rate measurement. The improvement rate was as follows up to 43.5% for PC1, 8% for KC1, 18% for KC2 and 76.5% for CM1.

Keywords

• Deep learning algorithms
• software fault prediction
• classification
• hyper parameters