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Article
Evaluating Defect Prediction using a Massive Set of Metrics
SAC '15: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Salamanca, Spain, April 13-17
  • Xiao XUAN, Zhejiang University
  • David LO, Singapore Management University
  • Xin XIA, Zhejiang University
  • Yuan TIAN, Singapore Management University
Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
4-2015
Abstract

To evaluate the performance of a within-project defect prediction approach, people normally use precision, recall, and F-measure scores. However, in machine learning literature, there are a large number of evaluation metrics to evaluate the performance of an algorithm, (e.g., Matthews Correlation Coefficient, G-means, etc.), and these metrics evaluate an approach from different aspects. In this paper, we investigate the performance of within-project defect prediction approaches on a large number of evaluation metrics. We choose 6 state-of-the-art approaches including naive Bayes, decision tree, logistic regression, kNN, random forest and Bayesian network which are widely used in defect prediction literature. And we evaluate these 6 approaches on 14 evaluation metrics (e.g., G-mean, F-measure, balance, MCC, J-coefficient, and AUC). Our goal is to explore a practical and sophisticated way for evaluating the prediction approaches comprehensively. We evaluate the performance of defect prediction approaches on 10 defect datasets from PROMISE repository. The results show that Bayesian network achieves a noteworthy performance. It achieves the best recall, FN-R, G-mean1 and balance on 9 out of the 10 datasets, and F-measure and J-coefficient on 7 out of the 10 datasets.

Keywords
  • Defect Prediction,
  • Evaluation Metric,
  • Machine Learning
ISBN
9781450331968
Identifier
10.1145/2695664.2695959
Publisher
ACM
City or Country
New York
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/2695664.2695959
Citation Information
Xiao XUAN, David LO, Xin XIA and Yuan TIAN. "Evaluating Defect Prediction using a Massive Set of Metrics" SAC '15: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Salamanca, Spain, April 13-17 (2015) p. 1644 - 1647
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/david_lo/255/