基于半监督集成学习的软件缺陷预测*

在软件缺陷预测中,标记样本不足与类不平衡问题会影响预测结果.为了解决这些问题,文中提出基于半监督集成学习的软件缺陷预测方法.该方法利用大量存在的未标记样本进行学习,得到较好的分类器,同时能集成一系列弱分类器,减少多数类数据对预测产生的偏倚.考虑到预测风险成本问题,文中还采用训练样本集权重向量更新策略,降低有缺陷模块预测为无缺陷模块的风险.在NASA MDP数据集上的对比实验表明,文中方法具有较好的预测效果.     

基于Box-Cox转换的集成跨项目软件缺陷预测方法

软件缺陷预测通过预先识别出被测项目内的潜在缺陷程序模块,可以优化测试资源的分配并提高软件产品的质量。论文对跨项目缺陷预测问题展开了深入研究,在源项目实例选择时,考虑了三种不同的实例相似度计算方法,并发现这些方法的缺陷预测结果存在多样性,因此提出了一种基于Box-Cox转换的集成跨项目软件缺陷预测方法BCEL,具体来说,首先基于不同的实例相似度计算方法,从候选集中选出不同的训练集,随后针对这些数据集,进行针对性的Box-Cox转化,并借助特定分类方法构造出不同的基分类器,最后将这三个基分类器进行有效集成。基于实际项目的数据集,验证了BCEL方法的有效性,并深入分析了BCEL方法内的影响因素对缺陷预测性能的影响。     

ON MULTI‐CLASS COST‐SENSITIVE LEARNING

Rescaling is possibly the most popular approach to cost‐sensitive learning. This approach works by rebalancing the classes according to their costs, and it can be realized in different ways, for example, re‐weighting or resampling the training examples in proportion to their costs, moving the decision boundaries of classifiers faraway from high‐cost classes in proportion to costs, etc. This approach is very effective in dealing with two‐class problems, yet some studies showed that it is often not so helpful on multi‐class problems. In this article, we try to explore why the rescaling approach is often helpless on multi‐class problems. Our analysis discloses that the rescaling approach works well when the costs are consistent, while directly applying it to multi‐class problems with inconsistent costs may not be a good choice. Based on this recognition, we advocate that before applying the rescaling approach, the consistency of the costs must be examined at first. If the costs are consistent, the rescaling approach can be conducted directly; otherwise it is better to apply rescaling after decomposing the multi‐class problem into a series of two‐class problems. An empirical study involving 20 multi‐class data sets and seven types of cost‐sensitive learners validates our proposal. Moreover, we show that the proposal is also helpful for class‐imbalance learning.     

Identifying composite crosscutting concerns through semi‐supervised learning

Aspect mining improves the modularity of legacy software systems through identifying their underlying crosscutting concerns (CCs). However, a realistic CC is a composite one that consists of CC seeds and relative program elements, which makes it a great challenge to identify a composite CC. In this paper, inspired by the state‐of‐the‐art information retrieval techniques, we model this problem as a semi‐supervised learning problem. First, the link analysis technique is adopted to generate CC seeds. Second, we construct a coupling graph, which indicates the relationship between CC seeds. Then, we adopt community detection technique to generate groups of CC seeds as constraints for semi‐supervised learning, which can guide the clustering process. Furthermore, we propose a semi‐supervised graph clustering approach named constrained authority‐shift clustering to identify composite CCs. Two measurements, namely, similarity and connectivity, are defined and seeded graph is generated for clustering program elements. We evaluate constrained authority‐shift clustering on numerous software systems including large‐scale distributed software system. The experimental results demonstrate that our semi‐supervised learning is more effective in detecting composite CCs. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multiple kernel ensemble learning for software defect prediction

Software defect prediction aims to predict the defect proneness of new software modules with the historical defect data so as to improve the quality of a software system. Software historical defect data has a complicated structure and a marked characteristic of class-imbalance; how to fully analyze and utilize the existing historical defect data and build more precise and effective classifiers has attracted considerable researchers’ interest from both academia and industry. Multiple kernel learning and ensemble learning are effective techniques in the field of machine learning. Multiple kernel learning can map the historical defect data to a higher-dimensional feature space and make them express better, and ensemble learning can use a series of weak classifiers to reduce the bias generated by the majority class and obtain better predictive performance. In this paper, we propose to use the multiple kernel learning to predict software defect. By using the characteristics of the metrics mined from the open source software, we get a multiple kernel classifier through ensemble learning method, which has the advantages of both multiple kernel learning and ensemble learning. We thus propose a multiple kernel ensemble learning (MKEL) approach for software defect classification and prediction. Considering the cost of risk in software defect prediction, we design a new sample weight vector updating strategy to reduce the cost of risk caused by misclassifying defective modules as non-defective ones. We employ the widely used NASA MDP datasets as test data to evaluate the performance of all compared methods; experimental results show that MKEL outperforms several representative state-of-the-art defect prediction methods.     

Cluster‐based ensemble of classifiers

This paper presents cluster‐based ensemble classifier – an approach toward generating ensemble of classifiers using multiple clusters within classified data. Clustering is incorporated to partition data set into multiple clusters of highly correlated data that are difficult to separate otherwise and different base classifiers are used to learn class boundaries within the clusters. As the different base classifiers engage on different difficult‐to‐classify subsets of the data, the learning of the base classifiers is more focussed and accurate. A selection rather than fusion approach achieves the final verdict on patterns of unknown classes. The impact of clustering on the learning parameters and accuracy of a number of learning algorithms including neural network, support vector machine, decision tree and k‐NN classifier is investigated. A number of benchmark data sets from the UCI machine learning repository were used to evaluate the cluster‐based ensemble classifier and the experimental results demonstrate its superiority over bagging and boosting.     

基于采样的半监督支持向量机软件缺陷预测方法

软件缺陷预测有助于提高软件开发质量,保证测试资源有效分配。针对软件缺陷预测研究中类标签数据难以获取和类不平衡分布问题,提出基于采样的半监督支持向量机预测模型。该模型采用无监督的采样技术,确保带标签样本数据中缺陷样本数量不会过低,使用半监督支持向量机方法,在少量带标签样本数据基础上利用无标签数据信息构建预测模型;使用公开的NASA软件缺陷预测数据集进行仿真实验。实验结果表明提出的方法与现有半监督方法相比,在综合评价指标[F]值和召回率上均优于现有方法;与有监督方法相比,能在学习样本较少的情况下取得相当的预测性能。     

One-class remote sensing classification: one-class vs. binary classifiers

Many applications of remote sensing only require the classification of a single land type. This is known as the one-class classification problem and it can be performed using either binary classifiers, by treating all other classes as the negative class, or one-class classifiers which only consider the class of interest. The key difference between these two approaches is in their training data and the amount of effort needed to produce it. Binary classifiers require an exhaustively labelled training data set while one-class classifiers are trained using samples of just the class of interest. Given ample and complete training data, binary classifiers generally outperform one-class classifiers. However, what is not clear is which approach is more accurate when given the same amount of labelled training data. That is, for a fixed labelling effort, is it better to use a binary or one-class classifier. This is the question we consider in this article. We compare several binary classifiers, including backpropagation neural networks, support vector machines, and maximum likelihood classifiers, with two one-class classifiers, one-class SVM, and presence and background learning (PBL), on the problem of one-class classification in high-resolution remote sensing imagery. We show that, given a fixed labelling budget, PBL consistently outperforms the other methods. This advantage stems from the fact that PBL is a positive-unlabelled method in which large amounts of readily available unlabelled data is incorporated into the training phase, allowing the classifier to model the negative class more effectively.     

开放网络环境下软件安全性测试技术研究

在开放网络环境下软件容易受到攻击,导致软件故障,需要进行安全性测试,针对无监督类测试方法开销较大和复杂度较高的问题,提出一种基于半监督自适应学习算法的软件安全性测试方法;首先采用模糊度量原理构建软件安全测试的半监督学习数学模型,分析软件产生安全性故障的数组特征,然后通过软件故障的熵特征分布方法进行软件的可靠性度量,在开放式网络环境下建立软件可靠性云决策模型,实现安全性测试和故障定位;最后通过仿真实验进行性能验证,结果表明,采用该方法进行软件安全性测试,对软件故障定位的准确度较高,测试的实时性较好,保障了软件的安全可靠运行。     

Semi-supervised Elastic net for pedestrian counting

Pedestrian counting plays an important role in public safety and intelligent transportation. Most pedestrian counting algorithms based on supervised learning require much labeling work and rarely exploit the topological information of unlabelled data in a video. In this paper, we propose a Semi-Supervised Elastic Net (SSEN) regression method by utilizing sequential information between unlabelled samples and their temporally neighboring samples as a regularization term. Compared with a state-of-the-art algorithm, extensive experiments indicate that our algorithm can not only select sparse representative features from the original feature space without losing their interpretability, but also attain superior prediction performance with only very few labelled frames.     

基于深度自编码网络的软件缺陷预测方法

软件缺陷预测是提升软件质量的有效方法,而软件缺陷预测方法的预测效果与数据集自身的特点有着密切的相关性。针对软件缺陷预测中数据集特征信息冗余、维度过大的问题,结合深度学习对数据特征强大的学习能力,提出了一种基于深度自编码网络的软件缺陷预测方法。该方法首先使用一种基于无监督学习的采样方法对6个开源项目数据集进行采样,解决了数据集中类不平衡问题;然后训练出一个深度自编码网络模型。该模型能对数据集进行特征降维,模型的最后使用了三种分类器进行连接,该模型使用降维后的训练集训练分类器,最后用测试集进行预测。实验结果表明,该方法在维数较大、特征信息冗余的数据集上的预测性能要优于基准的软件缺陷预测模型和基于现有的特征提取方法的软件缺陷预测模型,并且适用于不同分类算法。     

Boosting Techniques for Physics‐Based Vortex Detection

Robust automated vortex detection algorithms are needed to facilitate the exploration of large‐scale turbulent fluid flow simulations. Unfortunately, robust non‐local vortex detection algorithms are computationally intractable for large data sets and local algorithms, while computationally tractable, lack robustness. We argue that the deficiencies inherent to the local definitions occur because of two fundamental issues: the lack of a rigorous definition of a vortex and the fact that a vortex is an intrinsically non‐local phenomenon. As a first step towards addressing this problem, we demonstrate the use of machine learning techniques to enhance the robustness of local vortex detection algorithms. We motivate the presence of an expert‐in‐the‐loop using empirical results based on machine learning techniques. We employ adaptive boosting to combine a suite of widely used, local vortex detection algorithms, which we term weak classifiers, into a robust compound classifier. Fundamentally, the training phase of the algorithm, in which an expert manually labels small, spatially contiguous regions of the data, incorporates non‐local information into the resulting compound classifier. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by applying the compound classifier to two data sets obtained from computational fluid dynamical simulations. Our results demonstrate that the compound classifier has a reduced misclassification rate relative to the component classifiers.     

基于堆叠降噪稀疏自动编码器的软件缺陷预测

特征提取是软件缺陷预测中的关键步骤,特征提取的质量决定了缺陷预测模型的性能,但传统的特征提取方法难以提取出软件缺陷数据的深层本质特征。深度学习理论中的自动编码器能够从原始数据中自动学习特征,并获得其特征表示,同时为了增强自动编码器的鲁棒性,本文提出一种基于堆叠降噪稀疏自动编码器的特征提取方法,通过设置不同的隐藏层数、稀疏性约束和加噪方式,可以直接高效地从软件缺陷数据中提取出分类预测所需的各层次特征表示。利用Eclipse缺陷数据集的实验结果表明,该方法较传统特征提取方法具有更好的性能。     

基于邻域三支决策粗糙集模型的软件缺陷预测方法

基于已有软件缺陷数据,建立分类模型对待测软件模块进行预测,能够提高测试效率和降低测试成本。现有基于机器学习方法对软件缺陷预测的研究大部分基于二支决策方式,存在误分率较高等问题。本文针对软件缺陷数据具有代价敏感特性且软件度量取值为连续值等特性,提出了一种基于邻域三支决策粗糙集模型的软件缺陷预测方法,该方法对易分错的待测软件模块作出延迟决策,和二支决策方法相比,降低了误分类率。在NASA软件数据集上的实验表明所提方法能够提高分类正确率并减小误分类代价。     

基于集成混合采样的软件缺陷预测研究

对软件缺陷预测的不平衡问题进行了研究,提出了一种处理不平衡数据的采样方法,用来解决分类器因为样本集中的样本类别不平衡而造成分类器性能下降的问题。为了避免随机采样的盲目性,利用启发性的混合采样方法来平衡数据,针对少数类采用SMOTE过采样,对多数类采用K-Means聚类降采样,然后综合利用多个单分类器来进行投票集成预测分类。实验结果表明,混合采样与集成学习相结合的软件缺陷预测方法具有较好的分类效果,在获得较高的查全率的同时还能显著降低误报率。     

基于多核字典学习的软件缺陷预测

提出一种多核字典学习方法,用以对软件模块是否存在缺陷进行预测。用于软件缺陷预测的历史数据具有结构复杂、类不平衡的特点,用多个核函数构成的合成核将这些数据映射到一个高维特征空间,通过对多核字典基的选择,得到一个类别平衡的多核字典,用以对新的软件模块进行分类和预测,并判定其中是否存在缺陷。在NASA MDP数据集上的实验表明,与其他软件缺陷预测方法相比,多核字典学习方法能够针对软件缺陷历史数据结构复杂、类不平衡的特点,较好地解决软件缺陷预测问题。     

Using Unlabelled Data to Train a Multilayer Perceptron

This Letter presents an approach to using both labelled and unlabelled data to train a multilayer perceptron. The unlabelled data are iteratively pre-processed by a perceptron being trained to obtain the soft class label estimates. It is demonstrated that substantial gains in classification performance may be achieved from the use of the approach when the labelled data do not adequately represent the entire class distributions. The experimental investigations performed have shown that the approach proposed may be successfully used to train neural networks for learning different classification problems.     

A transfer cost-sensitive boosting approach for cross-project defect prediction

Software defect prediction has been regarded as one of the crucial tasks to improve software quality by effectively allocating valuable resources to fault-prone modules. It is necessary to have a sufficient set of historical data for building a predictor. Without a set of sufficient historical data within a company, cross-project defect prediction (CPDP) can be employed where data from other companies are used to build predictors. In such cases, a transfer learning technique, which extracts common knowledge from source projects and transfers it to a target project, can be used to enhance the prediction performance. There exists the class imbalance problem, which causes difficulties for the learner to predict defects. The main impacts of imbalanced data under cross-project settings have not been investigated in depth. We propose a transfer cost-sensitive boosting method that considers both knowledge transfer and class imbalance for CPDP when given a small amount of labeled target data. The proposed approach performs boosting that assigns weights to the training instances with consideration of both distributional characteristics and the class imbalance. Through comparative experiments with the transfer learning and the class imbalance learning techniques, we show that the proposed model provides significantly higher defect detection accuracy while retaining better overall performance. As a result, a combination of transfer learning and class imbalance learning is highly effective for improving the prediction performance under cross-project settings. The proposed approach will help to design an effective prediction model for CPDP. The improved defect prediction performance could help to direct software quality assurance activities and reduce costs. Consequently, the quality of software can be managed effectively.     

Value-cognitive boosting with a support vector machine for cross-project defect prediction

It is well-known that software defect prediction is one of the most important tasks for software quality improvement. The use of defect predictors allows test engineers to focus on defective modules. Thereby testing resources can be allocated effectively and the quality assurance costs can be reduced. For within-project defect prediction (WPDP), there should be sufficient data within a company to train any prediction model. Without such local data, cross-project defect prediction (CPDP) is feasible since it uses data collected from similar projects in other companies. Software defect datasets have the class imbalance problem increasing the difficulty for the learner to predict defects. In addition, the impact of imbalanced data on the real performance of models can be hidden by the performance measures chosen. We investigate if the class imbalance learning can be beneficial for CPDP. In our approach, the asymmetric misclassification cost and the similarity weights obtained from distributional characteristics are closely associated to guide the appropriate resampling mechanism. We performed the effect size A-statistics test to evaluate the magnitude of the improvement. For the statistical significant test, we used Wilcoxon rank-sum test. The experimental results show that our approach can provide higher prediction performance than both the existing CPDP technique and the existing class imbalance technique.     

Senti‐CS: Building a lexical resource for sentiment analysis using subjective feature selection and normalized Chi‐Square‐based feature weight generation

Sentiment analysis involves the detection of sentiment content of text using natural language processing. Natural language processing is a very challenging task due to syntactic ambiguities, named entity recognition, use of slangs, jargons, sarcasm, abbreviations and contextual sensitivity. Sentiment analysis can be performed using supervised as well as unsupervised approaches. As the amount of data grows, unsupervised approaches become vital as they cut down on the learning time and the requirements for availability of a labelled dataset. Sentiment lexicons provide an easy application of unsupervised algorithms for text classification. SentiWordNet is a lexical resource widely employed by many researchers for sentiment analysis and polarity classification. However, the reported performance levels need improvement. The proposed research is focused on raising the performance of SentiWordNet3.0 by using it as a labelled corpus to build another sentiment lexicon, named Senti‐CS. The part of speech information, usage based ranks and sentiment scores are used to calculate Chi‐Square‐based feature weight for each unique subjective term/part‐of‐speech pair extracted from SentiWordNet3.0. This weight is then normalized in a range of ?1 to +1 using min–max normalization. Senti‐CS based sentiment analysis framework is presented and applied on a large dataset of 50000 movie reviews. These results are then compared with baseline SentiWordNet, Mutual Information and Information Gain techniques. State of the art comparison is performed for the Cornell movie review dataset. The analyses of results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms state‐of‐the‐art classifiers.