Predicting component failures using latent Dirichlet allocation

Abstract

Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a statistical topic model that has been widely used to abstract semantic information from software source code. Failure refers to an observable error in the program behavior. This work investigates whether semantic information and failures recorded in the history can be used to predict component failures. We use LDA to abstract topics from source code and a new metric (topic failure density) is proposed by mapping failures to these topics. Exploring the basic information of topics from neighboring versions of a system, we obtain a similarity matrix. Multiply the Topic Failure Density (TFD) by the similarity matrix to get the TFD of the next version. The prediction results achieve an average 77.8% agreement with the real failures by considering the top 3 and last 3 components descending ordered by the number of failures. We use the Spearman coefficient to measure the statistical correlation between the actual and estimated failure rate. The validation results range from 0.5342 to 0.8337 which beats the similar method. It suggests that our predictor based on similarity of topics does a fine job of component failure prediction.