Performance Analysis of Resampling Techniques on Class Imbalance Issue in Software Defect Prediction

摘要

Predicting the defects at early stage of software development life cycle can improve the quality of end product at lower cost. Machine learning techniques have been proved to be an effective way for software defect prediction however an imbalance dataset of software defects is the main issue of lower and biased performance of classifiers. This issue can be resolved by applying the re-sampling methods on software defect dataset before the classification process. This research analyzes the performance of three widely used resampling techniques on class imbalance issue for software defect prediction. The resampling techniques include: “Random Under Sampling”, “Random Over Sampling” and “Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE)”. For experiments, 12 publically available cleaned NASA MDP datasets are used with 10 widely used supervised machine learning classifiers. The performance is evaluated through various measures including: F-measure, Accuracy, MCC and ROC. According to results, most of the classifiers performed better with “Random Over Sampling” technique in many datasets.