International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer and Communication Engineering

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TITLE Software Defect Prediction using Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks (LCNN) and Explainable AI (XAI)
ABSTRACT Software defects continue to pose a critical challenge in mission-critical systems, with the global cost of software bugs exceeding USD 1.1 trillion annually. Traditional machine learning approaches for Software Defect Prediction (SDP) treat code metrics as flat feature vectors, failing to capture the spatial correlations between different metric groups. This paper presents LCNN, a Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network system that introduces 2D Spatial Feature Extraction — transforming 20 NASA CM1 software metrics into a 4×5 spatial grid (“Metric Image”) — enabling a 2D-Residual CNN to learn hidden cross-metric dependencies invisible to tabular models. The NASA CM1 dataset (498 original samples) is expanded to 7,000 balanced samples using combined SMOTE and bootstrapped oversampling. The proposed LCNN 2D-CNN achieves a Test Accuracy of 94.50%, ROC-AUC of 0.976, and Defect Recall of 99.1% — outperforming all classical ML baselines. Explainable AI is integrated via LIME for per-prediction explanations and SHAP for global feature importance validation. The complete system is deployed as a Flask web dashboard with real-time inference, dynamic confidence bars, and embedded LIME visualizations.
AUTHOR DR. T.V.S SRIRAM, P. PRASAD, B.CHANDINI Sr. Asst. Professor, Dept. of MCA, NSRIT, Visakhapatnam, AP, India Asst. Professor, Dept. Of MCA, NSRIT, Visakhapatnam, AP, India Dept. of MCA, NSRIT, Visakhapatnam, AP, India
VOLUME 185
DOI DOI: 10.15680/IJIRCCE.2026.1406090
PDF pdf/90_Software Defect Prediction using Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks (LCNN) and Explainable AI (XAI).pdf
KEYWORDS
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