Centroid and Nearest Neighbor based Class Imbalance Reduction with Relevant Feature Selection using Ant Colony Optimization for Software Defect Prediction

Nowadays software defect prediction (SDP) is most active research going on in software engineering. Early detection of defects lowers the cost of the software and also improves reliability. Machine learning techniques are widely used to create SDP models based on programming measures. The majority of defect prediction models in the literature have problems with class imbalance and high dimensionality. In this paper, we proposed Centroid and Nearest Neighbor based Class Imbalance Reduction (CNNCIR) technique that considers dataset distribution characteristics to generate symmetry between defective and non-defective records in imbalanced datasets. The proposed approach is compared with SMOTE (Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique). The high-dimensionality problem is addressed using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) technique by choosing relevant features. We used nine different classifiers to analyze six open-source software defect datasets from the PROMISE repository and seven performance measures are used to evaluate them. The results of the proposed CNNCIR method with ACO based feature selection reveals that it outperforms SMOTE in the majority of cases.