A novel software defect prediction approach via weighted classification based on association rule mining

Software defect prediction technology is used to assist software practitioners in effectively allocating test resources and identifying hidden defects in a timely manner. However, the prediction of defect-prone software using association rule mining algorithms is limited because of the unbalanced distribution of defect data. Furthermore, although the existing weighted association rule mining approach considers item strength, the weight calculation still relies on expert experience and lacks fine granularity. We propose a novel software defect prediction approach based on mutual information and correlation coefficient weighted class association rule mining (MCWCAR). The MCWCAR model employs a cost-sensitive strategy and generates frequent itemsets according to three mining objectives while maintaining the original item distribution: defective class rules, non-defective class rules, and feature association relationships. During the weighted frequent itemset mining process, it combines feature selection and itemset screening to determine the appropriate feature combination through mutual information weighted support. Meanwhile, the correlation coefficient is applied to accurately depict the correlation between feature items and defect classes, serving as the weight to mine class association rules. Additionally, to ensure that interestingness measures have asymmetry and effectively represent negative associations under the condition of class imbalance, the added value is adopted in the filtering association rules. We conducted experiments on 27 open-source datasets and evaluated the performance differences between MCWCAR and state-of-the-art baseline classifiers. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms other baselines in terms of Balance, Gmean, MCC, and F-measure.