Reduction of Redundant Rules in Association Rule Mining-Based Bug Assignment

Abstract

Bug triaging is a process to decide what to do with newly coming bug reports. In this paper, we have mined association rules for the prediction of bug assignee of a newly reported bug using different bug attributes, namely, severity, priority, component and operating system. To deal with the problem of large data sets, we have taken subsets of data set by dividing the large data set using [Formula: see text]-means clustering algorithm. We have used an Apriori algorithm in MATLAB to generate association rules. We have extracted the association rules for top 5 assignees in each cluster. The proposed method has been empirically validated on 14,696 bug reports of Mozilla open source software project, namely, Seamonkey, Firefox and Bugzilla. In our approach, we observe that taking on these attributes (severity, priority, component and operating system) as antecedents, essential rules are more than redundant rules, whereas in [M. Sharma and V. B. Singh, Clustering-based association rule mining for bug assignee prediction, Int. J. Business Intell. Data Mining 11(2) (2017) 130–150.] essential rules are less than redundant rules in every cluster. The proposed method provides an improvement over the existing techniques for bug assignment problem.