MCDM-EFS: A novel ensemble feature selection method for software defect prediction using multi-criteria decision making

Software defect prediction models are used for predicting high risk software components. Feature selection has significant impact on the prediction performance of the software defect prediction models since redundant and unimportant features make the prediction model more difficult to learn. Ensemble feature selection has recently emerged as a new methodology for enhancing feature selection performance. This paper proposes a new multi-criteria-decision-making (MCDM) based ensemble feature selection (EFS) method. This new method is termed as MCDM-EFS. The proposed method, MCDM-EFS, first generates the decision matrix signifying the feature’s importance score with respect to various existing feature selection methods. Next, the decision matrix is used as the input to well-known MCDM method TOPSIS for assigning a final rank to each feature. The proposed approach is validated by an experimental study for predicting software defects using two classifiers K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and naïve bayes (NB) over five open-source datasets. The predictive performance of the proposed approach is compared with existing feature selection algorithms. Two evaluation metrics – nMCC and G-measure are used to compare predictive performance. The experimental results show that the MCDM-EFS significantly improves the predictive performance of software defect prediction models against other feature selection methods in terms of nMCC as well as G-measure.