Dissimilarity space based multi-source cross-project defect prediction

Abstract

Software defect prediction is an important means to guarantee software quality. Because there are no sufficient historical data within a project to train the classifier, cross-project defect prediction (CPDP) has been recognized as a fundamental approach. However, traditional defect prediction methods use feature attributes to represent samples, which cannot avoid negative transferring, may result in poor performance model in CPDP. This paper proposes a multi-source cross-project defect prediction method based on dissimilarity space (DM-CPDP). This method not only retains the original information, but also obtains the relationship with other objects. So it can enhances the discriminant ability of the sample attributes to the class label. This method firstly uses the density-based clustering method to construct the prototype set with the cluster center of samples in the target set. Then, the arc-cosine kernel is used to calculate the sample dissimilarities between the prototype set and the source domain or the target set to form the dissimilarity space. In this space, the training set is obtained with the earth mover's distance (EMD) method. For the unlabeled samples converted from the target set, the k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm is used to label those samples. Finally, the model is learned from training data based on TrAdaBoost method and used to predict new potential defects. The experimental results show that this approach has better performance than other traditional CPDP methods.