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

Published: 19 May 2023 Publication History

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.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
    ACM Transactions on Internet Technology  Volume 23, Issue 2
    May 2023
    276 pages
    ISSN:1533-5399
    EISSN:1557-6051
    DOI:10.1145/3597634
    • Editor:
    • Ling Liu
    Issue’s Table of Contents

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 19 May 2023
    Online AM: 27 March 2023
    Accepted: 21 March 2023
    Revised: 17 December 2022
    Received: 26 October 2021
    Published in TOIT Volume 23, Issue 2

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    Author Tags

    1. Concept drift
    2. paired learning
    3. software defect prediction
    4. software quality assurance

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    • (2024)Multi-Class Imbalanced Data Handling with Concept Drift in Fog Computing: A Taxonomy, Review, and Future DirectionsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/368962757:1(1-48)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
    • (2024)An Adaptive Pricing Framework for Real-Time AI Model Service ExchangeIEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering10.1109/TNSE.2024.343291711:5(5114-5129)Online publication date: Sep-2024
    • (2024)Software Defect Prediction Using an Intelligent Ensemble-Based ModelIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.335820112(20376-20395)Online publication date: 2024
    • (2024)WSBCV: A data-driven cross-version defect model via multi-objective optimization and incremental representation learningInformation Sciences10.1016/j.ins.2024.120595669(120595)Online publication date: May-2024
    • (2024)Software defect prediction ensemble learning algorithm based on 2-step sparrow optimizing extreme learning machineCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-024-04446-y27:8(11119-11148)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2024
    • (2023)Cross-Version Software Defect Prediction Considering Concept Drift and Chronological SplittingSymmetry10.3390/sym1510193415:10(1934)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023

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