A Particle Swarm Optimized Learning Model of Fault Classification in Web-Apps

The term web-app defines the current dynamic pragmatics of the website, where the user has control. Finding faults in such dynamic content is challenging, as to whether the fault is exposed or not depends on its execution path. Moreover, the complexity and uniqueness of each web application make fault assessment an extremely laborious and expensive task. Also, artificial fault injection models are run in controlled and simulated environments, which may not be representative of the real-world fault data. Classifying faults can intelligently enhance the quality of the web-apps by the assessment of probable faults. In this paper, an empirical study is conducted to classify faults in bug reports of three open-source web-apps (qaManager, bitWeaver, and WebCalendar) and reviews of two play store web-apps (Dineout: Reserve a Table and Wynk Music). Five supervised learning algorithms (naïve Bayesian, decision tree, support vector machines, K-nearest neighbor, and multi-layer perceptron) have been first evaluated based on the conventional term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) feature extraction method, and subsequently, a feature selection method to improve classifier performance is proposed using particle swarm optimization (a nature-inspired, meta-heuristic algorithm). This paper is a preliminary exploratory study to build an automated tool, which can optimally categorize faults. The empirical analysis validates that the particle swarm optimization for feature selection in fault classification task outperforms the tf-idf filter-based classifiers with an average accuracy gain of about 11% and nearly 26% average feature reduction. The highest accuracy of 93.35% is shown by the decision tree after feature selection.