Application of maximum entropy principle to software failure prediction

Predicting failures from software input is still a tough issue. Two models, namely the surface model and structure model, are presented in this paper to predict failure by applying the maximum entropy principle. The surface model forecasts a failure from the statistical co-occurrence between input and failure, while the structure model does from the statistical cause-effect between fault and failure. To evaluate the models, precision is applied and 17 testing experiments are conducted on 5 programs. Based on the experiments, the surface model and structure model get an average precision of 0.876 and 0.858, respectively