Improving Fault Localization Using Conditional Variational Autoencoder

Abstract

Fault localization analyzes the runtime information of two classes of test cases (i.e., passing test cases and failing test cases) to identify suspicious statements potentially responsible for a failure. However, the failing test cases are always far fewer than passing test cases in reality, and the class imbalance problem will affect fault localization effectiveness. To address this issue, we propose a data augmentation approach using conditional variational auto-encoder to synthesize new failing test cases for FL. The experimental results show that our approach significantly improves six state-of-the-art fault localization techniques.