Aging Related Bug Prediction using Extreme Learning Machines

Aging-Related Bugs (ARBs) occur in long running systems due to error conditions caused because of accumulation of problems such as memory leakage or unreleased files and locks. Aging-Related Bugs are hard to discover during software testing and also challenging to replicate. Automatic identification and prediction of aging related fault-prone files and classes in an object oriented system can help the software quality assurance team to optimize their testing efforts. In this paper, we present a study on the application of static source code metrics and machine learning techniques to predict aging related bugs. We conduct a series of experiments on publicly available dataset from two large open-source software systems: Linux and MySQL. Class imbalance and high dimensionality are the two main technical challenges in building effective predictors for aging related bugs. We investigate the application of five different feature selection techniques (OneR, Information Gain, Gain Ratio, RELEIF and Symmetric Uncertainty) for dimensionality reduction and SMOTE method to counter the effect of class imbalance in our proposed machine learning based solution approach. We apply Extreme Learning Machines (ELM) with three different kernels (linear, polynomial and RBF) and present experimental results which demonstarte the effectiveness of our approach.