An Efficient Hybrid Mine Blast Algorithm for Tackling Software Fault Prediction Problem

An inherent problem in software engineering is that competing prediction systems have been found to produce conflicting results. Yet accurate prediction is crucial because the complexity and quality of software requirements have dramatically changed in recent years, and consumers have become considerably more demanding in terms of the cost, timeframe, and quality of software solutions. Moreover, these variables may also be in direct conflict and can only be resolved by the optimum development of software by using reliable software engineering strategies. In this paper, a novel method based on the integration of the mine blast algorithm (MBA) and the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm is used to create input connection weights and biases for a back propagation neural network (BPNN) for the purpose of addressing the software fault prediction problem (SFP). The aim of hybridizing the MBA and SA is to find a way to efficiently explore and manipulate the search space. The proposed MBA-SA was tested on 18 datasets for SFP. The results indicated that the MBA-SA outperformed the MBA on all datasets. These results were subjected to additional statistical validity, boxplot distribution, and convergence analysis. Furthermore, a comparative evaluation of MBA-SA against twenty state-of-the-art methods for various output metrics was performed, and the result indicated that the hybrid MBA-SA outperformed most other state-of-the-art methods in the majority of datasets.