A Joint Learning Framework for Bridging Defect Prediction and Interpretation

Over the past fifty years, numerous software defect prediction (SDP) approaches have been proposed. However, the ability to explain why predictors make certain predictions remains limited. Explainable SDP has emerged as a promising solution by using explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods to clarify the decision-making processes of predictors. Despite this progress, there is still significant potential to enhance the reliability of existing approaches. To address this limitation, we treat defect prediction and the corresponding interpretation as two distinct but closely related tasks and propose a joint learning framework that allows for the simultaneous training of the predictor and its interpreter. The novelty of our approach lies in two main aspects: 1. We design feedback loops that convey the decision-making logic from the predictor to the interpreter. This ensures a high level of conciseness in decision logic and feature engineering for both the predictor and the interpreter, enabling the interpreter to achieve reliable local and global interpretability. 2. We incorporate the interpretation results as a penalty term in the loss function of the joint-learning framework. This not only improves the accuracy of the predictor but also imposes a stronger constraint on the reliability of the interpreter. We validated our proposed method against several existing explainable SDPs across multiple datasets. The results demonstrate its effectiveness in both interpretation and defect prediction. The source code for the proposed method is available at: https://github.com/BugPredictor/software-defect-prediction.git