NegCPARBP: Enhancing Privacy Protection for Cross-Project Aging-Related Bug Prediction Based on Negative Database
Dongdong Zhao, Zhihui Liu, Fengji Zhang, Lei Liu, Jacky Keung, Xiao Yu · IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing · 2025
The emergence ofAging-RelatedBugs(ARBs) poses a significant challenge to software systems, resulting in performance degradation and increased error rates in resource-intensive systems. Consequently, numerous ARB prediction methods have been developed to mitigate these issues. However, in scenarios where training data is limited, the effectiveness of ARB prediction is often suboptimal. To address this problem,Cross-ProjectAging-RelatedBugPrediction (CPARBP) is proposed, which utilizes data from other projects (i.e., source projects) to train a model aimed at predicting potential ARBs in a target project. However, the use of source-project data raises privacy concerns and discourages companies from sharing their data. Therefore, we propose a method calledCross-ProjectAging-RelatedBugPrediction based onNegative Database (NegCPARBP) for privacy protection. NegCPARBP first converts the feature vector of a software file into a binary string. Second, the correspondingNegativeDataBase (NDB) is generated based on this binary string, containing data that is significantly more expressive from the original feature vector. Furthermore, to ensure more accurate prediction of ARB-prone and ARB-free files based on privacy-protected data (i.e., maintain the data utility), we propose a novel negative database generation algorithm that captures more information about important features, using information gain as a measure. Finally, NegCPARBP extracts a new feature vector from theNDBto represent the original feature vector, facilitating data sharing and ARB prediction objectives. Experimental results on Linux, MySQL, and NetBSD datasets demonstrate that NegCPARBP achieves a high defense against attacks (privacy protection performance reaching 0.97) and better data utility compared to existing privacy protection methods.