Alice X. Zheng, Michael I. Jordan, Ben Liblit, Mayur Naik, Alex Aiken. Statistical debugging: simultaneous identification of multiple bugs. In William W. Cohen, Andrew Moore, editors, Machine Learning, Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Conference (ICML 2006), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, June 25-29, 2006. Volume 148 of ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, pages 1105-1112, ACM, 2006. [doi]
We describe a statistical approach to software debugging in the presence of multiple bugs. Due to sparse sampling issues and complex interaction between program predicates, many generic off-the-shelf algorithms fail to select useful bug predictors. Taking inspiration from bi-clustering algorithms, we propose an iterative collective voting scheme for the program runs and predicates. We demonstrate successful debugging results on several real world programs and a large debugging benchmark suite.