Abstract
BACKGROUND: Software Defect Prediction (SDP) enables developers to investigate unscrambled faults in the inaugural parts of the software progression mechanism. However, SDP faces the threat of high dimensionality. Feature selection (FS) selects the finest features while carefully discarding others. Several meta-heuristic algorithms, like Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, Differential Evolution, and Ant Colony Optimization, have been used to develop defect prediction models. However, these models have drawbacks like high cost, local optima trap, lower convergence rate, and higher parameter tuning. This study applies an innovative FS technique (FSCOA) rooted in Chernobyl Disaster Optimizer (CDO) technique. The proposed procedure intends to unwrap the best features for a prediction model while minimizing errors. METHODS: The proposed FSCOA investigated twelve public NASA software datasets from the PROMISE archive on Decision Tree, K-nearest neighbor, Naive Bayes, and Quantitative Discriminant Analysis classifiers. Furthermore, the accuracy of the recommended FSCOA method was correlated with existing FS techniques, like FSDE, FSPSO, FSACO, and FSGA. The statistical merit of the proposed measure was verified using Friedman and Holm tests. RESULTS: The experiment indicated that the proposed FSCOA approach bettered the accuracy in majority of the instances and achieved an average rank of 1.75 among other studied FS approaches while applying the Friedman test. Furthermore, the Holm test showed that the p-value was lower than or equivalent to the value of α/(A-i), except for the FSCOA and FSGA and FSCOA and FSACO models. CONCLUSION: The results illustrated the supremacy of the prospective FSCOA procedure over extant FS techniques with higher accuracy in almost all cases due to its advantages like enhanced accuracy, the ability to deal with convoluted, high-magnitude datasets not grounded in local optima, and a faster convergence rate. These advantages empower the suggested FSCOA method to overcome the challenges of the other studied FS techniques.