Iterative versus Exhaustive Data Selection for Cross Project Defect Prediction: An Extended Replication Study

TL;DR

This study replicates and extends previous research on data selection methods for cross-project defect prediction, demonstrating that iterative dataset selection improves recall and F-measure stability, making it a promising practical approach.

Contribution

It introduces an iterative dataset selection approach for CPDP, showing improved recall and F-measure stability over previous methods, with practical feasibility.

Findings

Iterative dataset selection achieves higher recall (0.933) than previous methods.

IDS has lower precision but comparable or better F-measure.

IDS is more stable across different test sets.

Abstract

Context: The effectiveness of data selection approaches in improving the performance of cross project defect prediction(CPDP) has been shown in multiple previous studies. Beside that, replication studies play an important role in the support of any valid study. Repeating a study using the same or different subjects can lead to better understandings of the nature of the problem. Objective: We use an iterative dataset selection (IDS) approach to generate training datasets and evaluate them on a set of randomly created validation datasets in the context of CPDP while considering a higher range of flexibility which makes the approach more feasible in practice. Method: We replicate an earlier study and present some insights into the achieved results while pointing out some of the shortcomings of the original study. Using the lessons learned, we propose to use an alternative training/validation dataset generation approaches which not only is more feasible in practice, but also achieves slightly better performances. We compare the results of our experiments to those from scenarios A, B, C and D from the original study. Results:Our experiments reveal that IDS is heavily recall based. The average recall performance for all test sets is 0.933 which is significantly higher than that from the replicated method. This in turn comes with a loss in precision. IDS has the lowest precision among the compared scenarios that use Decision Table learner. IDS however, achieves comparable or better F-measure performances. IDS achieves higher mean, median and min F-measure values while being more stable generally, in comparison with the replicated method. Conclusions: We conclude that datasets obtained from iterative/search-based approaches is a promising way to tackle CPDP. Especially, the performance increase in terms of both time and performance encourages further investigation of our approach.