Software Defect Prediction Model Based on Maximal Information Coefficient

In software defect prediction with a regression model, too many metrics extracted from static code and aggregated (sum, avg, max, min) from methods into classes can be candidate features, and the classical feature selection methods, such as AIC, BIC, should be processed at a given model. As a result, the selected feature sets are significantly different for various models without a reasonable interpretation. Maximal information coefficient (MIC) presented by Reshef et al.\ucite4 is a novel method to measure the degree of the interdependence between two continuous variables, and an available computing method is also given based on the observations. This paper firstly use the MIC between defect counts and each feature to select features, and then conduct the power transformation on the selected features, and finally build up the principal component Poisson and negative binomial regression model. All experiments are conducted on KC1 data set in NASA repository on the level of class. The block-regularized m\times 2 cross-validated sequential t-test is employed to test the difference of performance of two models. The performance measures of a model in this paper are FPA, AAE, ARE. The experimental results show that 1) the aggregated features, such as sum, avg, max, are selected by MIC except min, which are significantly different from AIC, BIC; 2) the power transformation to the features can improve the performance for majority of models; 3) after PCA and factorial analysis, two clear factors are obtained in the model. One corresponds to the aggregated features via avg and max, and the other corresponds to the aggregated features with sum. Therefore, the model owns a reasonable interpretation. Conclusively, the aggregated features with sum, avg, max are significantly effective for software defect prediction, and the regression model based on the selected features by MIC has some advantages.