Explainable Software Defects Classification Using SMOTE and Machine Learning

Abstract

Software defect prediction is a critical task in software engineering that aims to identify and mitigate potential defects in software systems. In recent years, numerous techniques and approaches have been developed to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the defect prediction model. In this research paper, we proposed a comprehensive approach that addresses class imbalance by utilizing stratified splitting, explainable AI techniques, and a hybrid machine learning algorithm. To mitigate the impact of class imbalance, we employed stratified splitting during the training and evaluation phases. This method ensures that the class distribution is maintained in both the training and testing sets, enabling the model to learn from and generalize to the minority class examples effectively. Furthermore, we leveraged explainable AI methods, Lime and Shap, to enhance interpretability in the machine learning models. To improve prediction accuracy, we propose a hybrid machine learning algorithm that combines the strength of multiple models. This hybridization allows us to exploit the strength of each model, resulting in improved overall performance. The experiment is evaluated using the NASA-MD datasets. The result revealed that handling the class imbalanced data using stratify splitting approach achieves a better overall performance than the SMOTE approach in Software Defect Detection (SDD).