Improving software quality prediction by noise filtering techniques

Dr. Khoshgoftaar and I outline our two filtering techniques, the multiple-partitioning filter and the iterative-partitioning filter respectively. The primary aim of this study is to compare the predictive performances of the final models built on the filtered and the un-filtered training datasets. A case study of software measurement data provided by the NASA is performed. The data is available through the Metrics Data Program (MDP) and includes software measurement data and associated error data collected at the subroutine level.

This article was published in the Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST) in Volume 22, Issue 3 in 2006. Details of the paper can be found on the editor web site.

Accuracy of machine learners is affected by quality of the data the learners are induced on. In this paper, quality of the training dataset is improved by removing instances detected as noisy by the Partitioning Filter. The fit dataset is first split into subsets, and different base learners are induced on each of these splits. The predictions are combined in such a way that an instance is identified as noisy if it is misclassified by a certain number of base learners. Two versions of the Partitioning Filter are used: Multiple-Partitioning Filter and Iterative-Partitioning Filter. The number of instances removed by the filters is tuned by the voting scheme of the filter and the number of iterations. The primary aim of this study is to compare the predictive performances of the final models built on the filtered and the un-filtered training datasets. A case study of software measurement data of a high assurance software project is performed. It is shown that predictive performances of models built on the filtered fit datasets and evaluated on a noisy test dataset are generally better than those built on the noisy (un-filtered) fit dataset. However, predictive performance based on certain aggressive filters is affected by presence of noise in the evaluation dataset.

@article{
 author = {Taghi M. Khoshgoftaar and Pierre Rebours},
 title = {Improving software quality prediction by noise filtering techniques},
 journal = {J. Comput. Sci. Technol.},
 volume = {22},
 number = {3},
 year = {2007},
 issn = {1000-9000},
 pages = {387--396},
 publisher = {Institute of Computing Technology},
 address = {Beijing, China},
 }