Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction Based on SMOTE and Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis

Cross-Project Defect Prediction(CPDP)is a method that utilizes historical data from other source projects to train predictive models for defect prediction in the target project.However,existing CPDP methods only consider linear correlations between features(indicators)of the source and target projects.These models are not capable of evaluating non-linear correlations between features when they exist,for example,when there are differences in data distributions between the source and target projects.As a result,the performance of such CPDP models is compromised.In this paper,this paper proposes a novel CPDP method based on Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique(SMOTE)and Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis(DCCA),referred to as S-DCCA.Canonical Correlation Analysis(CCA)is employed to address the issue of non-linear correlations between features of the source and target projects.S-DCCA extends CCA by incorporating the MlpNet model for feature extraction from the dataset.The redundant features are then eliminated by maximizing the correlated feature subset using the CCA loss function.Finally,cross-project defect prediction is achieved through the application of the SMOTE data sampling technique.Area Under Curve(AUC)and F1 scores(F1)are used as evaluation metrics.This paper conducted experiments on 27 projects from four public datasets to validate the proposed method.The results demonstrate that,on average,our method outperforms all baseline approaches by at least 1.2%in AUC and 5.5%in F1 score.This indicates that the proposed method exhibits favorable performance characteristics.

Graph-Based Feature Learning for Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction

Cross-project software defect prediction(CPDP)aims to enhance defect prediction in target projects with limited or no historical data by leveraging information from related source projects.The existing CPDP approaches rely on static metrics or dynamic syntactic features,which have shown limited effectiveness in CPDP due to their inability to capture higher-level system properties,such as complex design patterns,relationships between multiple functions,and dependencies in different software projects,that are important for CPDP.This paper introduces a novel approach,a graph-based feature learning model for CPDP(GB-CPDP),that utilizes NetworkX to extract features and learn representations of program entities from control flow graphs(CFGs)and data dependency graphs(DDGs).These graphs capture the structural and data dependencies within the source code.The proposed approach employs Node2Vec to transform CFGs and DDGs into numerical vectors and leverages Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM)networks to learn predictive models.The process involves graph construction,feature learning through graph embedding and LSTM,and defect prediction.Experimental evaluation using nine open-source Java projects from the PROMISE dataset demonstrates that GB-CPDP outperforms state-of-the-art CPDP methods in terms of F1-measure and Area Under the Curve(AUC).The results showcase the effectiveness of GB-CPDP in improving the performance of cross-project defect prediction.

Within-Project and Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction Based on Improved Transfer Naive Bayes Algorithm

With the continuous expansion of software scale,software update and maintenance have become more and more important.However,frequent software code updates will make the software more likely to introduce new defects.So how to predict the defects quickly and accurately on the software change has become an important problem for software developers.Current defect prediction methods often cannot reflect the feature information of the defect comprehensively,and the detection effect is not ideal enough.Therefore,we propose a novel defect prediction model named ITNB(Improved Transfer Naive Bayes)based on improved transfer Naive Bayesian algorithm in this paper,which mainly considers the following two aspects:(1)Considering that the edge data of the test set may affect the similarity calculation and final prediction result,we remove the edge data of the test set when calculating the data similarity between the training set and the test set;(2)Considering that each feature dimension has different effects on defect prediction,we construct the calculation formula of training data weight based on feature dimension weight and data gravity,and then calculate the prior probability and the conditional probability of training data from the weight information,so as to construct the weighted bayesian classifier for software defect prediction.To evaluate the performance of the ITNB model,we use six datasets from large open source projects,namely Bugzilla,Columba,Mozilla,JDT,Platform and PostgreSQL.We compare the ITNB model with the transfer Naive Bayesian(TNB)model.The experimental results show that our ITNB model can achieve better results than the TNB model in terms of accurary,precision and pd for within-project and cross-project defect prediction.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Based on Discriminative Subspace Learning for Cross-Project Defect Prediction

:Cross-project defect prediction(CPDP)aims to predict the defects on target project by using a prediction model built on source projects.The main problem in CPDP is the huge distribution gap between the source project and the target project,which prevents the prediction model from performing well.Most existing methods overlook the class discrimination of the learned features.Seeking an effective transferable model from the source project to the target project for CPDP is challenging.In this paper,we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation based on the discriminative subspace learning(DSL)approach for CPDP.DSL treats the data from two projects as being from two domains and maps the data into a common feature space.It employs crossdomain alignment with discriminative information from different projects to reduce the distribution difference of the data between different projects and incorporates the class discriminative information.Specifically,DSL first utilizes subspace learning based domain adaptation to reduce the distribution gap of data between different projects.Then,it makes full use of the class label information of the source project and transfers the discrimination ability of the source project to the target project in the common space.Comprehensive experiments on five projects verify that DSL can build an effective prediction model and improve the performance over the related competing methods by at least 7.10%and 11.08%in terms of G-measure and AUC.

Defect Prediction Using Akaike and Bayesian Information Criterion

Data available in software engineering for many applications contains variability and it is not possible to say which variable helps in the process of the prediction.Most of the work present in software defect prediction is focused on the selection of best prediction techniques.For this purpose,deep learning and ensemble models have shown promising results.In contrast,there are very few researches that deals with cleaning the training data and selection of best parameter values from the data.Sometimes data available for training the models have high variability and this variability may cause a decrease in model accuracy.To deal with this problem we used the Akaike information criterion(AIC)and the Bayesian information criterion(BIC)for selection of the best variables to train the model.A simple ANN model with one input,one output and two hidden layers was used for the training instead of a very deep and complex model.AIC and BIC values are calculated and combination for minimum AIC and BIC values to be selected for the best model.At first,variables were narrowed down to a smaller number using correlation values.Then subsets for all the possible variable combinations were formed.In the end,an artificial neural network(ANN)model was trained for each subset and the best model was selected on the basis of the smallest AIC and BIC value.It was found that combination of only two variables’ns and entropy are best for software defect prediction as it gives minimum AIC and BIC values.While,nm and npt is the worst combination and gives maximum AIC and BIC values.

A Cluster Based Feature Selection Method for Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction

Cross-project defect prediction （CPDP） uses the labeled data from external source software projects to com- pensate the shortage of useful data in the target project, in order to build a meaningful classification model. However, the distribution gap between software features extracted from the source and the target projects may be too large to make the mixed data useful for training. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based novel method FeSCH （Feature Selection Using Clusters of Hybrid-Data） to alleviate the distribution differences by feature selection. FeSCH includes two phases. Tile feature clustering phase clusters features using a density-based clustering method, and the feature selection phase selects features from each cluster using a ranking strategy. For CPDP, we design three different heuristic ranking strategies in the second phase. To investigate the prediction performance of FeSCH, we design experiments based on real-world software projects, and study the effects of design options in FeSCH （such as ranking strategy, feature selection ratio, and classifiers）. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of FeSCH. Firstly, compared with the state-of-the-art baseline methods, FeSCH achieves better performance and its performance is less affected by the classifiers used. Secondly, FeSCH enhances the performance by effectively selecting features across feature categories, and provides guidelines for selecting useful features for defect prediction.

A Novel Cross-Project Software Defect Prediction Algorithm Based on Transfer Learning

Software Defect Prediction(SDP) technology is an effective tool for improving software system quality that has attracted much attention in recent years.However,the prediction of cross-project data remains a challenge for the traditional SDP method due to the different distributions of the training and testing datasets.Another major difficulty is the class imbalance issue that must be addressed in Cross-Project Defect Prediction(CPDP).In this work,we propose a transfer-leaning algorithm(TSboostDF) that considers both knowledge transfer and class imbalance for CPDP.The experimental results demonstrate that the performance achieved by TSboostDF is better than those of existing CPDP methods.

Combined classifier for cross-project defect prediction： an extended empirical study

To facilitate developers in effective allocation of their testing and debugging efforts, many software defect prediction techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques can be used to predict classes that are more likely to be buggy based on the past history of classes, methods, or certain other code elements. These techniques are effective provided that a sufficient amount of data is available to train a prediction model. However, sufficient training data are rarely available for new software projects. To resolve this problem, cross-project defect prediction, which transfers a prediction model trained using data from one project to another, was proposed and is regarded as a new challenge in the area of defect prediction. Thus far, only a few cross-project defect prediction techniques have been proposed. To advance the state of the art, in this study, we investigated seven composite algorithms that integrate multiple machine learning classifiers to improve cross-project defect prediction. To evaluate the performance of the composite algorithms, we performed experiments on 10 open-source software systems from the PROMISE repository, which contain a total of 5,305 instances labeled as defective or clean. We compared the composite algorithms with the combined defect predictor where logistic regression is used as the meta classification algorithm （CODEPLogistic）, which is the most recent cross-project defect prediction algorithm in terms of two standard evaluation metrics： cost effectiveness and F-measure. Our experimental results show that several algorithms outperform CODEPLogistic：Maximum voting shows the best performance in terms of F-measure and its average F-measure is superior to that of CODEPLogistic by 36.88%. Bootstrap aggregation （Bagging J48） shows the best performance in terms of cost effectiveness and its average cost effectiveness is superior to that of CODEPLogistic by 15.34%.

Effort-aware cross-project just-in-time defect prediction framework for mobile apps

As the boom of mobile devices,Android mobile apps play an irreplaceable roles in people’s daily life,which have the characteristics of frequent updates involving in many code commits to meet new requirements.Just-in-Time(JIT)defect prediction aims to identify whether the commit instances will bring defects into the new release of apps and provides immediate feedback to developers,which is more suitable to mobile apps.As the within-app defect prediction needs sufficient historical data to label the commit instances,which is inadequate in practice,one alternative method is to use the cross-project model.In this work,we propose a novel method,called KAL,for cross-project JIT defect prediction task in the context of Android mobile apps.More specifically,KAL first transforms the commit instances into a high-dimensional feature space using kernel-based principal component analysis technique to obtain the representative features.Then,the adversarial learning technique is used to extract the common feature embedding for the model building.We conduct experiments on 14 Android mobile apps and employ four effort-aware indicators for performance evaluation.The results on 182 cross-project pairs demonstrate that our proposed KAL method obtains better performance than 20 comparative methods.

Cross-project software defect prediction based on multi-source data sets

Cross-project defect prediction(CPDP) uses one or more source projects to build a defect prediction model and applies the model to the target project. There is usually a big difference between the data distribution of the source project and the target project, which makes it difficult to construct an effective defect prediction model. In order to alleviate the problem of negative migration between the source project and the target project in CPDP, this paper proposes an integrated transfer adaptive boosting(TrAdaBoost) algorithm based on multi-source data sets(MSITrA). The algorithm uses an existing two-stage data filtering algorithm to obtain source project data related to the target project from multiple source items, and then uses the integrated TrAdaBoost algorithm proposed in the paper to build a CPDP model. The experimental results of Promise’s 15 public data sets show that: 1) The cross-project software defect prediction model proposed in this paper has better performance in all tested CPDP methods;2) In the within-project software defect prediction(WPDP) experiment, the proposed CPDP method has achieved the better experimental results than the tested WPDP method.

Cross Project Defect Prediction via Balanced Distribution Adaptation Based Transfer Learning

Defect prediction assists the rational allocation of testing resources by detecting the potentially defective software modules before releasing products. When a project has no historical labeled defect data, cross project defect prediction (CPDP) is an alternative technique for this scenario. CPDP utilizes labeled defect data of an external project to construct a classification model to predict the module labels of the current project. Transfer learning based CPDP methods are the current mainstream. In general, such methods aim to minimize the distribution differences between the data of the two projects. However, previous methods mainly focus on the marginal distribution difference but ignore the conditional distribution difference, which will lead to unsatisfactory performance. In this work, we use a novel balanced distribution adaptation (BDA) based transfer learning method to narrow this gap. BDA simultaneously considers the two kinds of distribution differences and adaptively assigns different weights to them. To evaluate the effectiveness of BDA for CPDP performance, we conduct experiments on 18 projects from four datasets using six indicators (i.e., F-measure, g-means, Balance, AUC, EARecall, and EAF-measure). Compared with 12 baseline methods, BDA achieves average improvements of 23.8%, 12.5%, 11.5%, 4.7%, 34.2%, and 33.7% in terms of the six indicators respectively over four datasets.