Genetic programming-based decision trees for software quality classification

The knowledge of the likely problematic areas of a software system is very useful for improving its overall quality. Based on such information, a more focused software testing and inspection plan can be devised. Decision trees are attractive for a software quality classification problem which predicts the quality of program modules in terms of risk-based classes. They provide a comprehensible classification model which can be directly interpreted by observing the tree-structure. A simultaneous optimization of the classification accuracy and the size of the decision tree is a difficult problem, and very few studies have addressed the issue. This paper presents an automated and simplified genetic programming (gp) based decision tree modeling technique for the software quality classification problem. Genetic programming is ideally suited for problems that require optimization of multiple criteria. The proposed technique is based on multi-objective optimization using strongly typed GP. In the context of an industrial high-assurance software system, two fitness functions are used for the optimization problem: one for minimizing the average weighted cost of misclassification, and one for controlling the size of the decision tree. The classification performances of the GP-based decision trees are compared with those based on standard GP, i.e., S-expression tree. It is shown that the GP-based decision tree technique yielded better classification models. As compared to other decision tree-based methods, such as C4.5, GP-based decision trees are more flexible and can allow optimization of performance objectives other than accuracy. Moreover, it provides a practical solution for building models in the presence of conflicting objectives, which is commonly observed in software development practice.