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A feature selection strategy for improving software maintainability prediction

Software maintainability is a significant contributor while choosing particular software. It is helpful in estimation of the efforts required after delivering the software to the customer. However, issues like imbalanced distribution of datasets, and redundant and irrelevant occurrence of various features degrade the performance of maintainability prediction models. Therefore, current study applies ImpS algorithm to handle imbalanced data and extensively investigates several Feature Selection (FS) techniques including Symmetrical Uncertainty (SU), RandomForest filter, and Correlation-based FS using one open-source, three proprietaries and two commercial datasets. Eight different machine learning algorithms are utilized for developing prediction models. The performance of models is evaluated using Accuracy, G-Mean, Balance, & Area under the ROC Curve. Two statistical tests, Friedman Test and Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test are conducted for assessing different FS techniques. The results substantiate that FS techniques significantly improve the performance of various prediction models with an overall improvement of 18.58%, 129.73%, 80.00%, and 45.76% in the median values of Accuracy, G-Mean, Balance, & AUC, respectively for all the datasets taken together. Friedman test advocates the supremacy of SU FS technique. Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test showcases that SU FS technique is significantly superior to the CFS technique for three out of six datasets.