Concept Drift in Software Defect Prediction: A Method for Detecting and Handling the Drift

Abstract

Software Defect Prediction (SDP) is crucial towards software quality assurance in software engineering. SDP analyzes the software metrics data for timely prediction of defect prone software modules. Prediction process is automated by constructing defect prediction classification models using machine learning techniques. These models are trained using metrics data from historical projects of similar types. Based on the learned experience, models are used to predict defect prone modules in currently tested software. These models perform well if the concept is stationary in a dynamic software development environment. But their performance degrades unexpectedly in the presence of change in concept (Concept Drift). Therefore, concept drift (CD) detection is an important activity for improving the overall accuracy of the prediction model. Previous studies on SDP have shown that CD may occur in software defect data and the used defect prediction model may require to be updated to deal with CD. This phenomenon of handling the CD is known as CD adaptation. It is observed that still efforts need to be done in this direction in the SDP domain. In this article, we have proposed a pair of paired learners (PoPL) approach for handling CD in SDP. We combined the drift detection capabilities of two independent paired learners and used the paired learner (PL) with the best performance in recent time for next prediction. We experimented on various publicly available software defect datasets garnered from public data repositories. Experimentation results showed that our proposed approach performed better than the existing similar works and the base PL model based on various performance measures.