Towards Interpretable Defect-Prone Component Analysis Using Genetic Fuzzy Systems

The problem of Software Reliability Prediction is attracting the attention of several researchers during the last few years. Various classification techniques are proposed in current literature which involve the use of metrics drawn from version control systems in order to classify software components as defect-prone or defect-free. In this paper, we create a novel genetic fuzzy rule-based system to efficiently model the defect-proneness of each component. The system uses a Mamdani-Assilian inference engine and models the problem as a one-class classification task. System rules are constructed using a genetic algorithm, where each chromosome represents a rule base (Pittsburgh approach). The parameters of our fuzzy system and the operators of the genetic algorithm are designed with regard to producing interpretable output. Thus, the output offers not only effective classification, but also a comprehensive set of rules that can be easily visualized to extract useful conclusions about the metrics of the software.