TDSelector: A Training Data Selection Method for Cross-Project Defect Prediction

In recent years, cross-project defect prediction (CPDP) attracted much attention and has been validated as a feasible way to address the problem of local data sparsity in newly created or inactive software projects. Unfortunately, the performance of CPDP is usually poor, and low quality training data selection has been regarded as a major obstacle to achieving better prediction results. To the best of our knowledge, most of existing approaches related to this topic are only based on instance similarity. Therefore, the objective of this work is to propose an improved training data selection method for CPDP that considers both similarity and the number of defects each training instance has (denoted by defects), which is referred to as TDSelector, and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our experiments were conducted on 14 projects (including 15 data sets) collected from two public repositories. The results indicate that, in a specific CPDP scenario, the TDSelector-based bug predictor performs, on average, better than those based on the baseline methods, and the AUC (area under ROC curve) values are increased by up to 10.6 and 4.3%, respectively. Besides, an additional experiment shows that selecting those instances with more bugs directly as training data can further improve the performance of the bug predictor trained by our method.