Summary:
Several classification techniques have been investigated and evaluated earlier for the software fault prediction. These techniques have produced different prediction accuracy for the different software systems and none of the technique has always performed consistently better across different domains. On the other hand, software fault prediction using ensemble methods can be very effective, as they take the advantage of each participating technique for the given dataset and try to come up with better prediction
results compared to the individual techniques. Many works are available for classifying software modules being faulty or non-faulty using the ensemble methods. These works are only specifying that whether a given software module is faulty or not, but number of faults in that module are not predicted by them. The use of ensemble methods for the prediction of number of faults has not been explored so far. To fulfill this gap, this paper presents ensemble methods for the prediction of number of faults in the given software modules. The experimental study is designed and conducted for five open-source software projects with their fifteen releases, collected from the PROMISE data repository. The results are evaluated under two different scenarios, intra-release prediction and inter-releases prediction. The prediction accuracy of ensemble methods is evaluated using absolute error, relative error, prediction at level l, and measure of completeness performance measures.