Abstract
In software development, the main problem is recognizing the security-oriented issues within the reported bugs due to their unacceptable failure rate to provide satisfactory reliability on customer and software datasets. The misclassification of bug reports has a direct impact on the effectiveness of the bug prediction model. The misclassification issue surely compromises the accuracy of the system. Manually reviewing bug reports is necessary to solve this problem, but doing so takes a lot of time and is tiresome for developers and testers. This paper proposes a novel hybrid approach based on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. To address these issues, the intended outcomes are multi-class supervised classification and bug prioritization using supervised classifiers. After being collected, the dataset was prepared for vectorization, subjected to exploratory data analysis, and preprocessed. The feature extraction and selection methods used for a bag of words are TF-IDF and word2vec. Machine learning models are created after the dataset has undergone a full transformation. This study proposes, develops, and assesses four classifiers: multinomial Naive Bayes, decision tree, logistic regression, and random forest. The hyper-parameters of the models are tuned, and it is concluded that random forest outperformed with a 91.73% test and 100% training accuracy. The SMOTE technique was used to balance the highly imbalanced dataset, which was initially created for the justified classification. The comparison between balanced and imbalanced dataset models clearly showed the importance of the balanced dataset in classification as it outperformed in all experiments.