Feature selection using combination of Genetic-Whale-Ant colony algorithms for software fault prediction by machine learning

Software fault prediction methods are used to predict fault-prone modules in the early stages of software development. Machine learning techniques are the most common techniques used in software fault prediction. Data dimensionality is one of the problems that affect the performance of machine learning algorithms. Data dimensionality means the existence of irrelevant or redundant features that may mislead the learning algorithm hence decrease its accuracy. Low accuracy of software fault prediction causes late detection of some faulty modules and as a result increases the effort and cost of fixing faults abnormally. Therefore, solving data dimensionality problem is necessary to increase the accuracy of software fault prediction. Researchers use feature selection algorithms for dimensionality reduction. Feature selection algorithms are divided into two types of filter-based feature selection and wrapper-based feature selection algorithms. Wrapper-based algorithms lead to higher accuracy prediction models. In these algorithms we can use different methods to search for the best solutions that best of them is metaheuristic search. Each of the metaheuristic algorithms has some strengths and weaknesses that researchers use combination of these algorithms to address these weaknesses. In this research, to address the weaknesses of each metaheuristic algorithm, a combination of genetic, ant colony and whale optimization algorithm is used as wrapper feature selection. Obviously, the application of early software faults prediction methods before the actual test is one of the effective passive defense techniques in reducing software systems development costs. 19 software projects are used to evaluate proposed method. Comparison of the results with other methods shows that the proposed method outperforms other methods.