›› 2011, Vol. 26 ›› Issue (2): 328-342.doi: 10.1007/s11390-011-1135-6

Special Issue: Software Systems

• Software Engineering • Previous Articles    

Software Defect Detection with ROCUS

Yuan Jiang (姜远), Member, CCF, Ming Li (黎铭), Member, CCF, ACM, IEEE, and Zhi-Hua Zhou (周志华), Senior Member, CCF, IEEE, Member, ACM   

  1. National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China
  • Received:2009-05-15 Revised:2010-10-26 Online:2011-03-05 Published:2011-03-05
  • About author:Yuan Jiang received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Nanjing University, China, in 2004. Now she is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University. Her research interests include machine learning, information retrieval and data mining. In these areas, she has published more than 30 technical papers in refereed journals or conferences. She served as the publication chair of PAKDD'07, also served as program committee members for many conferences such as CCTA'07, BIBE'07, ICNC'08, ICNC'09, CCDM'09, NCIIP'09, CCML'10. She is now a committee member of Machine Learning Society of Chinese Association of Artificial Intelligence (CAAI), and is a committee member of Artificial Intelligence Society of Jiangsu Computer Association. She is a member of CCF. She was selected in the Program for New Century Excellent talents in University, Ministry of Education, in 2009.
    Ming Li received the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Nanjing University, China, in 2003 and 2008 respectively. He is currently an assistant professor with LAMDA Group, the Department of Computer Sciences and Technology, Nanjing University. His major research interests include machine learning, data mining and information retrieval, especially on learning with labeled and unlabeled data. He has been granted various awards including the CCF Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (2009), Microsoft Fellowship Award (2005). He served on the program committee of a number of important international conferences including KDD'10, ACML'10, ACML'09, ACM CKIM'09, IEEE ICME'10, AI'10, and served as reviewers for a number of refereed journals including IEEE Trans. KDE, IEEE Trans. NN, IEEE Trans. SMCC, ACM Trans. IST, Pattern Recognition, Knowledge and Information Systems, Journal of Computer Science and Technology. He is a committee member of the Machine Learning Society of the CAAI, member of ACM, IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, CCF and CAAI.
    Zhi-Hua Zhou received the B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Nanjing University, China, in 1996, 1998 and 2000, respectively, all with the highest honors. He joined the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Nanjing University as an assistant professor in 2001, and is currently Cheung Kong Professor and Director of the LAMDA Group. His research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, information retrieval, evolutionary computation and neural computation. In these areas he has published over 70 papers in leading international journals or conference proceedings. Dr. Zhou has won various awards/honors including the National Science and Technology Award for Young Scholars of China (2006), the Award of National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (2003), the National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award of China (2003), the Microsoft Young Professorship Award (2006). He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, associate editor-in-chief of Chinese Science Bulletin, and on the editorial boards of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Intelligent Data Analysis, Science in China. He is the founder of ACML, Steering Committee member of PAKDD and PRI-CAI, Program Committee Chair/Co-Chair of PAKDD'07, PRICAI'08 and ACML'09, vice Chair or area Chair of conferences including IEEE ICDM'06, IEEE ICDM'08, SIAM DM'09, ACM CIKM'09, and general chair/co-chair or program committee chair/co-chair of a dozen of native conferences. He is the chair of the Machine Learning Society of the CAAI, vice chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition Society of the CCF, and chair of the IEEE Computer Society Nanjing Chapter. He is a fellow of IET, a member of AAAI and ACM, and a senior member of IEEE, IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, CCF.
  • Supported by:

    This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 60975043, 60903103, and 60721002.

Software defect detection aims to automatically identify defective software modules for efficient software test in order to improve the quality of a software system. Although many machine learning methods have been successfully applied to the task, most of them fail to consider two practical yet important issues in software defect detection. First, it is rather difficult to collect a large amount of labeled training data for learning a well-performing model; second, in a software system there are usually much fewer defective modules than defect-free modules, so learning would have to be conducted over an imbalanced data set. In this paper, we address these two practical issues simultaneously by proposing a novel semi-supervised learning approach named Rocus. This method exploits the abundant unlabeled examples to improve the detection accuracy, as well as employs under-sampling to tackle the class-imbalance problem in the learning process. Experimental results of real-world software defect detection tasks show that Rocus is effective for software defect detection. Its performance is better than a semi-supervised learning method that ignores the class-imbalance nature of the task and a class-imbalance learning method that does not make effective use of unlabeled data.

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