Candidate project selection in cross project defect prediction using hybrid method

Abstract

Cross Project Defect Prediction (CPDP) is a process that develops a defect prediction model on source projects and then applies the same model to the target project. Day by day, new software projects are being developed, so selecting an appropriate training project from existing projects and from new upcoming projects, to train a predictor model is a challenging task in CPDP. In the present study, we have proposed a hybrid selection method to select a candidate project from existing projects and a probabilistic method to select a candidate project from new projects. The proposed hybrid method is a weighted combination of the Collaborative filtering (CF) method and the Content Based (CB) method. The probabilistic method is based on a Naïve Bayes classifier and is used to predict the relation between the target project and the new target project. In the CF method, a usability score is generated for each project by making use of classification techniques, and the CB method calculates the matching score of candidate projects by using the K-dimensional tree. Finally, both the methods are combined by parallelized hybridization design, and weights for the proposed method are estimated with an empirical bootstrapping method. The score generated by the proposed hybrid technique is then used to identify the most suitable candidate project for the new project. The experimental results show that the suggestion list of the best three candidate projects is consistent when employing different classifiers. The recommendation performance is evaluated in terms of F-score and Mean Average Precision (MAP), and the proposed method has shown improved performance as compared to the existing methods in both terms.