Code Multiview Hypergraph Representation Learning for Software Defect Prediction

Abstract

Software defect prediction technology aids the reliability assurance team in identifying defect-prone code and assists the team in reasonably allocating limited testing resources. Recently, researchers assumed that the topological associations among code fragments could be harnessed to construct defect prediction models. Nevertheless, existing graph-based methods only concentrate on features of single-view association, which fail to fully capture the rich information hidden in the code. In addition, software defects may involve multiple code fragments simultaneously, but traditional binary graph structures are insufficient for representing these multivariate associations. To address these two challenges, this article proposes a multiview hypergraph representation learning approach (MVHR-DP) to amplify the potency of code features in defect prediction. MVHR-DP initiates by creating hypergraph structures for each code view, which are then amalgamated into a comprehensive fusion hypergraph. Following this, a hypergraph neural network is established to extract code features from multiple views and intricate associations, thereby enhancing the comprehensiveness of representation in the modeling data. Empirical study shows that the prediction model utilizing features generated by MVHR-DP exhibits superior area under the curve (AUC), F-measure, and matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) results compared to baseline approaches across within-project, cross-version, and cross-project prediction tasks.