Correlation feature and instance weights transfer learning for cross project software defect prediction

Abstract

Abstract Due to the differentiation between training and testing data in the feature space, cross‐project defect prediction (CPDP) remains unaddressed within the field of traditional machine learning. Recently, transfer learning has become a research hot‐spot for building classifiers in the target domain using the data from the related source domains. To implement better CPDP models, recent studies focus on either feature transferring or instance transferring to weaken the impact of irrelevant cross‐project data. Instead, this work proposes a dual weighting mechanism to aid the learning process, considering both feature transferring and instance transferring. In our method, a local data gravitation between source and target domains determines instance weight, while features that are highly correlated with the learning task, uncorrelated with other features and minimizing the difference between the domains are rewarded with a higher feature weight. Experiments on 25 real‐world datasets indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the existing CPDP methods in most cases. By assigning weights based on the different contribution of features and instances to the predictor, the proposed approach is able to build a better CPDP model and demonstrates substantial improvements over the state‐of‐the‐art CPDP models.