Entropy, Vol. 24, Pages 1373: Research of Software Defect Prediction Model Based on Complex Network and Graph Neural Network (Entropy)

The goal of software defect prediction is to make predictions by mining the historical data using models. Current software defect prediction models mainly focus on the code features of software modules. However, they ignore the connection between software modules. This paper proposed a software defect prediction framework based on graph neural network from a complex network perspective. Firstly, we consider the software as a graph, where nodes represent the classes, and edges represent the dependencies between the classes. Then, we divide the graph into multiple subgraphs using the community detection algorithm. Thirdly, the representation vectors of the nodes are learned through the improved graph neural network model. Lastly, we use the representation vector of node to classify the software defects. The proposed model is tested on the PROMISE dataset, using two graph convolution methods, based on the spectral domain and spatial domain in the graph neural network. The investigation indicated that both convolution methods showed an improvement in various metrics, such as accuracy, F-measure, and MCC (Matthews correlation coefficient) by 86.6%, 85.8%, and 73.5%, and 87.5%, 85.9%, and 75.5%, respectively. The average improvement of various metrics was noted as 9.0%, 10.5%, and 17.5%, and 6.3%, 7.0%, and 12.1%, respectively, compared with the benchmark models.