On The Effectiveness of One-Class Support Vector Machine in Different Defect Prediction Scenarios

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Autori principali: Moussa, Rebecca, Azar, Danielle, Sarro, Federica
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2022
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author Moussa, Rebecca
Azar, Danielle
Sarro, Federica
author_facet Moussa, Rebecca
Azar, Danielle
Sarro, Federica
contents Defect prediction aims at identifying software components that are likely to cause faults before a software is made available to the end-user. To date, this task has been modeled as a two-class classification problem, however its nature also allows it to be formulated as a one-class classification task. Previous studies show that One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) can outperform two-class classifiers for within-project defect prediction, however it is not effective when employed at a finer granularity (i.e., commit-level defect prediction). In this paper, we further investigate whether learning from one class only is sufficient to produce effective defect prediction model in two other different scenarios (i.e., granularity), namely cross-version and cross-project defect prediction models, as well as replicate the previous work at within-project granularity for completeness. Our empirical results confirm that OCSVM performance remain low at different granularity levels, that is, it is outperformed by the two-class Random Forest (RF) classifier for both cross-version and cross-project defect prediction. While, we cannot conclude that OCSVM is the best classifier, our results still show interesting findings. While OCSVM does not outperform RF, it still achieves performance superior to its two-class counterpart (i.e., SVM) as well as other two-class classifiers studied herein. We also observe that OCSVM is more suitable for both cross-version and cross-project defect prediction, rather than for within-project defect prediction, thus suggesting it performs better with heterogeneous data. We encourage further research on one-class classifiers for defect prediction as these techniques may serve as an alternative when data about defective modules is scarce or not available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2202_12074
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On The Effectiveness of One-Class Support Vector Machine in Different Defect Prediction Scenarios
Moussa, Rebecca
Azar, Danielle
Sarro, Federica
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Defect prediction aims at identifying software components that are likely to cause faults before a software is made available to the end-user. To date, this task has been modeled as a two-class classification problem, however its nature also allows it to be formulated as a one-class classification task. Previous studies show that One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) can outperform two-class classifiers for within-project defect prediction, however it is not effective when employed at a finer granularity (i.e., commit-level defect prediction). In this paper, we further investigate whether learning from one class only is sufficient to produce effective defect prediction model in two other different scenarios (i.e., granularity), namely cross-version and cross-project defect prediction models, as well as replicate the previous work at within-project granularity for completeness. Our empirical results confirm that OCSVM performance remain low at different granularity levels, that is, it is outperformed by the two-class Random Forest (RF) classifier for both cross-version and cross-project defect prediction. While, we cannot conclude that OCSVM is the best classifier, our results still show interesting findings. While OCSVM does not outperform RF, it still achieves performance superior to its two-class counterpart (i.e., SVM) as well as other two-class classifiers studied herein. We also observe that OCSVM is more suitable for both cross-version and cross-project defect prediction, rather than for within-project defect prediction, thus suggesting it performs better with heterogeneous data. We encourage further research on one-class classifiers for defect prediction as these techniques may serve as an alternative when data about defective modules is scarce or not available.
title On The Effectiveness of One-Class Support Vector Machine in Different Defect Prediction Scenarios
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.12074