• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.77-90
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• 2018

Software Defect Prediction (SDP) is a field of study that identifies defective modules. With insufficient local data, a company can exploit Cross-Project Defect Prediction (CPDP), a way to build a classifier using dataset collected from other companies. Most machine learning algorithms for SDP have used more than one parameter that significantly affects prediction performance depending on different values. The objective of this study is to propose a parameter selection technique to enhance the performance of CPDP. Using a Harmony Search algorithm (HS), our approach tunes parameters of cost-sensitive boosting, a method to tackle class imbalance causing the difficulty of prediction. According to distributional characteristics, parameter ranges and constraint rules between parameters are defined and applied to HS. The proposed approach is compared with three CPDP methods and a Within-Project Defect Prediction (WPDP) method over fifteen target projects. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model outperforms the other CPDP methods in the context of class imbalance. Unlike the previous researches showing high probability of false alarm or low probability of detection, our approach provides acceptable high PD and low PF while providing high overall performance. It also provides similar performance compared with WPDP.