Contrasting the Hyperparameter Tuning Impact Across Software Defect Prediction Scenarios
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Software defect prediction (SDP) is crucial for delivering high-quality software products. The SDP activities help software teams better utilize their software quality assurance efforts, improving the quality of the final product. Recent research has indicated that prediction performance improvements in SDP are achievable by applying hyperparameter tuning to a particular SDP scenario (e.g., predicting defects for a future version). However, the positive impact resulting from the hyperparameter tuning step may differ based on the targeted SDP scenario. Comparing the impact of hyperparameter tuning across two SDP scenarios is necessary to provide comprehensive insights and enhance the robustness, generalizability, and, eventually, the practicality of SDP modeling for quality assurance. <p xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Therefore, in this study, we contrast the impact of hyperparameter tuning across two pivotal and consecutive SDP scenarios: (1) Inner Version Defect Prediction (IVDP) and (2) Cross Version Defect Prediction (CVDP). The main distinctions between the two scenarios lie in the scope of defect prediction and the selected evaluation setups. This study’s experiments use common evaluation setups, 28 machine learning (ML) algorithms, 53 post-release software datasets, two tuning algorithms, and five optimization metrics. We apply statistical analytics to compare the SDP performance impact differences by investigating the overall impact, the single ML algorithm impact, and variations across different software dataset sizes. <p xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">The results indicate that the SDP gains within the IVDP scenario are significantly larger than those within the CVDP scenario. The results reveal that asserting performance gains for up to 24 out of 28 ML algorithms may not hold across multiple SDP scenarios. Furthermore, we found that small software datasets are more susceptible to larger differences in performance impacts. Overall, the study findings recommend software engineering researchers and practitioners to consider the effect of the selected SDP scenario when expecting performance gains from hyperparameter tuning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".