  Previous studies have found that a significant number of bug reports are
misclassified between bugs and non-bugs, and that manually classifying bug
reports is a time-consuming task. To address this problem, we propose a bug
reports classification model with N-gram IDF, a theoretical extension of
Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) for handling words and phrases of any length.
N-gram IDF enables us to extract key terms of any length from texts, these key
terms can be used as the features to classify bug reports. We build
classification models with logistic regression and random forest using features
from N-gram IDF and topic modeling, which is widely used in various software
engineering tasks. With a publicly available dataset, our results show that our
N-gram IDF-based models have a superior performance than the topic-based models
on all of the evaluated cases. Our models show promising results and have a
potential to be extended to other software engineering tasks.
