Software Defect Prediction Based on Elman Neural Network and Cuckoo Search Algorithm

In software engineering, defect prediction is significantly important and challenging. The main task is to predict the defect proneness of the modules. It helps developers find bugs effectively and prioritize their testing efforts. At present, a lot of valuable researches have been done on this topic. However, few studies take into account the impact of time factors on the prediction results. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an improved Elman neural network model to enhance the adaptability of the defect prediction model to the time-varying characteristics. Specifically, we optimized the initial weights and thresholds of the Elman neural network by incorporating adaptive step size in the Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithm. We evaluated the proposed model on 7 projects collected from public PROMISE repositories. The results suggest that the contribution of the improved CS algorithm to Elman neural network model is prominent, and the prediction performance of our method is better than that of 5 baselines in terms of F-measure and Cliff’s Delta values. The F-measure values are generally increased with a maximum growth rate of 49.5% for the POI project.