IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY, VOL. 67, NO.

3, SEPTEMBER 2018 885

Ridge and Lasso Regression Models for

Cross-Version Defect Prediction
Xiaoxing Yang and Wushao Wen

Abstract—Sorting software modules in order of defect count can Ranksum Wilcoxon rank-sum test.
help testers to focus on software modules with more defects. One of RF Random forest.
the most popular methods for sorting modules is generalized linear RR Ridge regression.
regression. However, our previous study showed the poor perfor-
mance of these regression models, which might be caused by severe VIF Variance inflation factor.
multicollinearity. Ridge regression (RR) can improve the predic-
tion performance for multicollinearity problems. Lasso regression
NOTATIONS
(LAR) is a worthy competitor to RR. Therefore, we investigate both
RR and LAR models for cross-version defect prediction. Cross- n Number of training software modules.
version defect prediction is an approximate to real applications. It d Number of metrics.
constructs prediction models from a previous version of projects X Metric matrix of n training samples.
and predicts defects in the next version. Experimental results based xi Metric vector of the ith training software modules.
on 11 projects from the PROMISE repository consisting of 41 dif- xi,j jth metric value in vector xi .
ferent versions show that: 1) there exist severe multicollinearity
problems in the experimental datasets; 2) both RR and LAR mod-
yi Defect number of the ith training module.
els perform better than linear regression and negative binomial m Number of testing software modules.
regression for cross-version defect prediction; and 3) compared zi Metric vector of the ith testing software modules.
with two best methods in our previous study for sorting software f (zi ) Relative defect number of the ith testing software
modules according to the predicted number of defects, RR has modules predicted by models.
comparable performance and less model construction time. XT X Moment matrix.
Index Terms—Lasso regression (LAR), multicollinearity, ridge λm ax Largest eigenvalues of the moment matrix.
regression (RR), software defect prediction, sorting modules in λm in Smallest eigenvalues of the moment matrix.
order of defect count. Ri2 Coefficient of determination in the regression of ex-
planatory variable xi on the remaining explanatory
ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS variables of the model.
CK Chidamber and Kemerer. αj Parameter for xj to decide prediction models.
CLC Cumulative lift chart (also the area under CLC). k Ridge parameter of RR.
FPA Fault-percentile-average. I Identity matrix.
GCV Generalized cross-validation. RSS (y − Xα)T (y − Xα).
HKB Ridge estimator proposed by Hoerl, Kennard, and si Actual defect number in module fi .
Baldwin. s Total number of defects in all modules.
LAR Lasso regression.
Lasso Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator.
LR Linear regression.
LTR Learning-to-rank approach. I. INTRODUCTION
LW Ridge estimator proposed by Lawless and Wang. OFTWARE testing activities play a key role in software
NBR
PCA
Negative binomial regression.
Principal component analysis.
S development, which consume a great amount of resources
including time, money, and personnel [1]. Sorting software mod-
PCR Principal component regression. ules (files, packages, etc.) in order of defect count, which we
call as software defect prediction for the ranking task, can help
Manuscript received September 7, 2017; revised March 10, 2018 and May 22, testers to focus on software modules with more defects and iden-
2018; accepted June 9, 2018. Date of publication June 29, 2018; date of current
version August 30, 2018. This work was supported in part by the National tify defects more quickly [1], [2]. The process mainly includes
Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61602534 and in part by two parts: data and model construction methods [3]. First, we
the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No.17lgpy122). obtain data from software modules, according to software met-
Associate Editor: T. H. Tse. (Corresponding author: Wushao Wen.)
X. Yang is with the School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-Sen Uni-
rics (also referred to as features or attributes), such as lines of
versity, Guangzhou 510006, China, and also with the Guangdong Key Labora- code and previous defects [4]. Second, modeling approaches
tory of Big Data Analysis and Processing, Guangzhou 510006, China (e-mail:, such as linear regression (LR) and random forest (RF) are em-
yangxx27@mail.sysu.edu.cn). ployed to construct a model based on the data from modules
W. Wen is with the School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-Sen
University, Guangzhou 510006, China (e-mail:,wenwsh@mail.sysu.edu.cn). with known defect numbers. Finally, the constructed model is
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TR.2018.2847353 used to predict the defect information of the software modules
0018-9529 © 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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 886
whose defect numbers are unknown, and thus, an order of these
modules based on the predicted defect numbers is obtained,
which can help allocate testing resources [3].
One of the most popular methods for sorting modules in order
of defect count is generalized LR [1], [2], [5], [6], including LR
[7]. In our previous work, we found that these generalized LR
models performed poorly over most experimental datasets, and
the possible reason was that the experimental datasets had severe
multicollinearity problems (the condition numbers were larger
than 100) [3]. Generalized LR models have merits: they are
simple and easy to interpret the relationship between prediction
values and metrics. Therefore, we attempt to find a model that
has the above merits of generalized LR models and give better
performance when the multicollinearity problems exist. To be
specific, we focus only on the multicollinearity problems in
this paper, instead of other data quality problems such as class
imbalance [8], [9] or unlabeled datasets [10], and we attempt to
find a method that can reduce multicollinearity when building
models, without additional data processing.
According to Freund et al.’s book [11], multicollinearity prob-
lems can be solved by variable selection, redefining variables,
and biased estimation. Selecting partial software metrics (vari-
able selection) can reduce multicollinearity, and lead to more
accurate models. Variable selection is used in many applica-
tions to reduce noisy or redundant variables. However, it is not
easy to determine how many metrics should be selected, and
the reduced datasets might lose some important metrics. Vari-
ables redefinition includes methods based on knowledge of the
variables, and methods based on statistical analysis. The former
methods need knowledge of the variables. It is difficult to decide
how to redefine variables, especially when there is a large col-
lection of variables. The latter methods convert original metrics
into a new set of metrics. A famous representative is principal
component analysis (PCA). One shortcoming of these methods
is that we have to transform the new metrics back to obtain
an estimator, which can tell the effectiveness of the original
metrics. Biased estimation can achieve better prediction with-
out data processing for multicollinearity problems. They reduce
multicollinearity when constructing models.
In this paper, we investigate two famous biased estimation
methods (ridge regression (RR) [12], [13] and least absolute
shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) regression [14]) for
sorting software modules in order of defect count over cross-
version datasets. Cross-version defect prediction is similar to
practical use: a former version is used to train a model, and
the constructed model is used to predict the latter version. It
is more practical than the other two ways of building models,
i.e., cross-project defect prediction and cross-validation defect
prediction [15].
Our objectives include: 1) investigating whether RR or lasso
regression (LAR) could perform better than LR and negative
binomial regression (NBR) for cross-version defect prediction;
2) studying the choice of the ridge parameter of RR for soft-
ware defect prediction; 3) checking whether there exist multi-
collinearity problems in the experimental datasets (11 projects
from the PROMISE repository consisting of 41 different ver-
sions of these projects); and 4) comparing RR and LAR against
two best methods in our previous study [3] and one PCA-based
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY, VOL. 67, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2018
method for sorting software modules according to the predicted
number of defects.
The main contributions of this paper include the following.
1) First analysis of the choice of the ridge parameter of RR
for software defect prediction for the ranking task.
2) First application of LAR for software defect prediction
for the ranking task.
3) Further analysis of multicollinearity problems in 41 pub-
licly available datasets in software defect prediction do-
main.
4) A comparison study of RR and LAR with five other model
construction algorithms for cross-version defect predic-
tion for the ranking task.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We present
an overview of related work in Section II. Section III describes
multicollinearity, RR, and LAR. Section IV details the experi-
mental methodologies, including datasets, evaluation measures,
and implementation. We show and discuss experimental results
in Section V. The threats to validity are described in Section VI.
Section VII draws the conclusions and points out future work.
II. RELATED WORK
In this paper, we investigate the application of RR and LAR
to solve multicollinearity problems in cross-version defect pre-
diction for the ranking task. Therefore, this section presents the
related work from three aspects: model construction methods
for defect prediction for the ranking task, cross-version defect
prediction, and multicollinearity in defect prediction.
A. Model Construction Methods for Defect Prediction for the
Ranking Task
Sorting software modules in order of defect count is one kind
of software defect prediction, which employs software metrics
to predict the number of defects in order to support software
testing activities [2], [3], [16].
Ohlsson and Alberg [17] used an LR method to construct soft-
ware defect prediction models, in order to predict the number of
defects in software modules before coding started. They applied
Alberg diagram [the same as cumulative lift chart (CLC)] and
percentages of defects in the top modules to evaluate models,
and demonstrated the usefulness of Alberg diagram. Khoshgof-
taar and Allen [7] used LR to construct models to predict an or-
der of software modules, and they pointed out that module-order
models gave management more flexible reliability enhancement
strategies than classification models.
Ostrand et al. [1] applied NBR and a very simple model based
on only the lines of codes to construct models, to predict the
expected number of defects in each module of the next release
of a large commercial system, employing percentages of defects
in the top 20% modules to evaluate software defect prediction
models. NBR achieved better results than the simple model.
However, from the graphs of the actual defects and models, there
were much space for improving prediction models. Ostrand et al.
also used the prediction models to give the order of modules
according to the defect density.
Gao and Khoshgoftaar [5] compared eight count models over
a full-scale industrial software system. The comparative study
 YANG AND WEN: RIDGE AND LASSO REGRESSION MODELS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
showed that zero-inflated NBR and hurdle NBR were more ef-
fective according to the pairwise hypothesis testing techniques,
information criteria-based comparative techniques, and Pear-
son’s chi-square measure, but hurdle Poisson regression with
threshold 2 was better according to the prediction accuracy.
The comparison results of model construction methods highly
depended on the performance measures for evaluating models.
Therefore, it is important to use the appropriate performance
measures for evaluating defect prediction models.
Schroter et al. [18] compared four methods, including RR,
to construct the prediction models. They used RR to penalize
outliers. From the performance measures and analysis, Schroter
et al. focused on classification task instead of ranking task. And
they concluded that RR was similar to LR so that they did not
discuss RR in detail. Different from their work, we attempt
to study the application of RR for software defect prediction
for the ranking task, instead of the classification task. In ad-
dition, we analyze the choice of the ridge parameter of RR in
this application, which was not included in Schroter et al.’s
work [18].
Weyuker et al. [6] compared four approaches—NBR, RF, re-
cursive partitioning, and Bayesian additive regression trees—for
predicting the ranking of modules based on defects. Weyuker
et al. proposed a new performance measure [fault-percentile-
average (FPA)], which was based on the whole ranking given
by the prediction models and put more emphases on the for-
mer ranking. Experimental results indicated that NBR and RF
models performed better than the other two models according to
percentages of defects in the top 20% modules and FPA. Based
on a longer time for fitting RF and the nondeterministic results
of RF models, Weyuker et al. concluded that linear and additive
models were good and realistic for software defect prediction.
We [3] proposed a learning-to-rank (LTR) approach to di-
rectly optimize the ranking performance measures, and the ex-
perimental results showed that the LTR approach and RF were
better for constructing software defect prediction models for
the ranking task. LTR was better over datasets with three met-
rics and RF was better over the original datasets. We found
that the poor results of LR models and generalized LR mod-
els might be caused by the existence of severe multicollinearity
in experimental datasets, whose condition number were larger
than 100.
B. Cross-Version Defect Prediction
When using one-version data, holdout, cross-validation, and
bootstrap family techniques are popular model validation tech-
niques. Tantithamthavorn et al. [19] investigated the bias and
variance of 12 model validation techniques in the domain of
defect prediction, and they pointed out that selecting an appro-
priate model validation technique was a critical experimental
design choice. The authors recommended the use of out-of-
sample bootstrap validation in defect prediction studies.
Cross-project prediction [20] is a challenge and hot topic in
defect prediction recently. Shukla et al. [15] pointed out that as
previous version of same software project would have similar
parameter distribution among files, cross-version defect predic-
tion was more practical than cross-project prediction and cross-
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887
validation prediction. Therefore, cross-version defect prediction
has been also studied recently [3], [15], [21].
Shukla et al. [15] compared multiobjective defect prediction
models with four traditional machine learning algorithms for
cross-version defect prediction for the classification task, and
they pointed out that the multiobjective logistic regression was
more cost-effective than single-objective algorithms.
Bennin et al. [21] conducted cross-release evaluation of 11
fault density prediction models (K star, M5 etc.) based on data
collected from 25 open source software projects, using an effort-
aware performance measure. The authors found that M5 tree
model performed best when assuming cross-release prediction,
but there were no statistically significant differences among all
methods.
C. Multicollinearity in Defect Prediction
The phenomenon that some software metrics are highly cor-
related with each other has been found long ago. For example,
Ohlsson et al. [17] used correlation coefficients to investigate
not only the relationship between metrics and the number of de-
fects, but also the relationship among 11 metrics, and they found
that the metrics that most correlated with the number of defects
were highly correlated with each other. Graves et al. [22] com-
puted correlation coefficients among complexity metrics, and
found that most complexity metrics were highly correlated to
the lines of code.
In order to reduce the redundancy of software metrics,
many studies focus on variable selection methods. For ex-
ample, Menzies et al. [23] used information gain to select
metrics, and pointed that two or three metrics could work as
well as all metrics for building prediction models. Khoshgof-
taar et al. [24] compared seven metric selection methods, and
found that information gain and signal to noise ratio were
better than other methods for choosing metrics to construct
prediction models. Chen et al. [25] proposed a new metric
selection method using multiobjective optimization, and the
experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of their pro-
posed method.
Parsa et al. [26] applied recursive RR for selecting most ef-
fective bug predictors of software, and used association rule
generation technique to find the main causes of program failure.
Different from Parsa et al.’s work, we employ RR to directly
construct defect prediction models based on all the software
metrics in this paper, instead of selecting bug predictors. The
analysis of the choice of the ridge parameter of RR was not
included in Parsa et al.’s work [26].
III. MULTICOLLINEARITY AND PENALIZED REGRESSION
In this section, we introduce multicollinearity and two penal-
ized regression, i.e., RR and LAR.
A. Multicollinearity
Multicollinearity can be defined as the existence of strong
correlations among the independent variables [11]. It can be
caused by many reasons. One possible reason is that the physical
meaning of variables (i.e., metrics in software defect prediction)
determines the collinearity among them. For example, if lines of
 888
code correspond to lines of comments in a program, then lines of
code are correlated to lines of comments in the dataset generated
from this program. Another reason is the large collection of
metrics. In order to construct a better model, we tend to collect
as many metrics that are relevant to defects as possible in case we
miss some key metrics of software modules. This often causes
serious multicollinearity in datasets.
There are several ways to detect multicollinearity [27]. The
first way is to compute the correlation matrix of predictor vari-
ables. However, this method cannot tell clearly the degree of
multicollinearity. Other ways include tolerance value or vari-
ance inflation factor (VIF), Eigenvalue, and condition number.
In this paper, we adopt condition number and VIF to detect
multicollinearity.
Condition number can be calculated through the ratio of the
largest eigenvalue to its smallest eigenvalue as follows:
λm ax
cond =
λm in
where λm ax and λm in are the largest and smallest eigenvalues,
which are characteristic roots of the moment matrix XT X. The
moment matrix will be introduced in Section III-B. If the small-
est eigenvalue is close to zero or the condition number is larger
than 100, it indicates serious multicollinearity [13].
VIF can be computed as follows:
1 Ordinary least-square regression minimizes RSS =
VIFi =
1 − Ri2
where Ri2 is the coefficient of determination in the regression
of explanatory variable xi on the remaining explanatory vari-
ables of the model. If VIFi is larger than 10, there exists high
multicollinearity [27].
As mentioned in Section I, variable selection(such as infor-
mation gain [3]), variable redefining (such as PCA), and biased
estimation are three main kinds of methods to deal with multi-
collinearity problems. In this paper, we investigate two biased
estimation methods (RR [12] and LAR [14]) for software defect
prediction. They are introduced in Section III-B.
B. Ridge and Lasso Regression
Given n training metric vectors of software modules
xi = (xi,1 , xi,2 , · · · · · · , xi,d ) (i: 1 to n, xi is the metric vec-
tor of the ith software module, xi,j is the jth metric value in
vector xi , and d is number of metrics), which compose a met-
ric matrix X, and corresponding defect number yi , the goal of
software defect prediction for the ranking task is to construct a
software defect prediction model based on these training data
and then to predict the relative defect numbers of m testing
vectors zi (i:1 to m), which is denoted as f (zi ). An order of
software modules can be obtained according to the predicted
defect numbers. This order can help testers to focus on software
modules with more defects and identify defects more quickly.
A multiple LR model can be written as follows:

d responding datasets, and the column of “total defects” records
f (zi ) = αj zi,j
j =1
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY, VOL. 67, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2018
where αj s are the corresponding parameters obtained by train-
ing. Once αj s are fixed, the model is learned. For training
data, both metric vectors (denoted as X) and corresponding
defect number (denoted as y) are known. Then, the ordinary
least-square estimate of α is as follows:
α = (XT X)−1 XT y. (4)
One consequence of severe multicollinearity is that the in-
verse of moment matrix XT X, which is used in LR and gen-
eralized LR, may be inaccurate. In the case of perfect multi-
collinearity, the matrix XT X cannot be inverted and the ordi-
nary least-squares estimator does not exist. RR can overcome
these difficulties, which is based on adding a biasing constant
k to the diagonal of XT X before computing the estimate of α.
The resulting estimator is obtained as the following equation:
ᾱ = (XT X + kI)−1 XT y (5)
where k is a ridge parameter and I is an identity matrix. Note
(1)
that if k equals to zero, the RR becomes LR. The choice of
the ridge parameter is the key to RR models. There has been a
substantial amount of interest in estimating a good value of k
from the data [28]. In this paper, we compare three estimation
methods: generalized cross-validation (GCV) [28], the ridge
estimator proposed by Hoerl, Kennard, and Baldwin (the method
is called HKB for short)[29], and the ridge estimator proposed
by Lawless and Wang (the method is called LW for short) [30].
(2)
(y − Xα)T (y − Xα) directly, while RR minimizes RSS

subject to a constraint di=1 |αi |2 ≤ t (t ≥ 0). LAR minimize

RSS subject to a constraint di=1 |αi | ≤ t (t ≥ 0). The lasso
shrinks the ordinary least-squares estimator towards zero and
potentially sets αi to zero for some i, and it can perform as
a variable selection operator [31]. The lasso solution can be
computed by the combined quadratic programming method
[14], the shooting algorithm [31], least angle regression [32],
and coordinate descent algorithm [33].
IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
In this section, we detail datasets, evaluation measures, and
implementation, respectively.
A. Datasets
In this paper, we use the 11 open-source projects that include
data for three or more versions in the PROMISE repository
[15]. Different from Shukla et al.’s work [15], we employ the
defect number instead of the categories (defect-prone or not) as
the dependent variable. These datasets include Chidamber and
Kemerer (CK) metrics1 [34], [35], which are popularly used in
software defect prediction domain [15], [36].
The characteristics of these experimental datasets are pre-
sented in Table I. The column of “faulty modules” records
the number of modules having defects (with the percentages
of faulty modules in the subsequent brackets), the column of
“range of defects” records ranges of defect numbers in the cor-
(3)
1 http://openscience.us/repo/defect/ck/
 YANG AND WEN: RIDGE AND LASSO REGRESSION MODELS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
TABLE I
EXPERIMENTAL DATASETS
the total number of defects in all the modules of the correspond-
ing datasets.
B. Evaluation Measures
Because we research on software defect prediction for the
ranking task instead of classification task, we adopt the CLC
(also referred to as Alberg diagram) [17], [37] and FPA [6],
instead of recall, f-measure, or other classification indicators.
In our previous work [3], we proved that the CLC and FPA
should be consistent to evaluate a ranking. Nevertheless, we
adopt both CLC and FPA as performance measures because
they are advocated by different researchers. Details of FPA and
CLC are described below.
Considering m modules f1 , f2 , . . . ,fm , listed in increasing
order of predicted defect number, si as the actual defect number
in the module fi , and s = s1 + s2 + ... + sm as the total number
of defects in all the modules, the proportion of actual defects in
the top t predicted modules (i.e., top t modules predicted to have

most defects) to the whole defects is 1s m i=m −t+1 si . Then FPA
is defined as follows [6]:
1 1 
m m
si .
m t=1 s i=m −t+1
Actually, FPA is an average of the proportions of actual defects
in the top i (i: 1 to m) predicted modules. Larger FPA means bet-
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889
ter ranking performance, and can help allocate testing resources
better on the whole.
CLC [37] uses percentages of modules as x-axis and percent-
ages of defects as y-axis. The area under CLC is always used for
comparison, and the area is simply denoted as CLC in this paper.
Considering m modules f1 , f2 , ..., fm , listed in increasing order
of predicted defect number, si as the actual defect number in
the module fi , and s = s1 + s2 + ... + sm as the total number
of defects in all the modules, the area under the curve should
be computed as the sum of areas of trapezoid composed of two
adjacent points and the axes in the CLC. Using CLC to denote
the area under the curve in rest of the paper, it can be computed
as follows:

m
CLC = trapezoidt
t=1
    
1 1 sm 
= 0+ + ...
m 2 s
 
sm + ... + s2 sm + ... + s1
+ + . (6)
s s
C. Implementation
In this section, we present the implementation details.
According to the objectives, we mainly conduct four
experiments.
1) First, we compute condition numbers and VIFs of these
datasets to detect the degree of multicollinearity.
2) Subsequently, we compare the performance of RR and
LAR with LR and NBR, in order to investigate whether
RR or LAR could perform better than LR and NBR for
cross-version defect prediction. We also study different
choices of the ridge parameter of RR for software defect
prediction.
3) After that, we compare RR and LAR with principal com-
ponent regression (PCR).
4) Finally, we compare RR and LAR with two best meth-
ods (RF and LTR) in the previous study [3] for sorting
software modules in order of defect count, in order to
investigate whether RR or LAR is a good method for sort-
ing modules in order of defect count. We also compare
the model construction time of all methods.
Condition numbers and VIFs are computed in MATLAB
(2009), RR, LAR, LR, NBR, RF, and PCR are implemented
in R2 , and LTR is implemented in Java. Like the previous work
[3], we use the default parameters for LR and NBR, and set the
number of trees for RF to 500. For LTR, we set the feasible solu-
tion space to Ω = di=1 [−20, 20], and both population size and
maximal generation are set to 100. For LAR, the lasso solution
is computed by least angle regression [32]. We compare three
estimation methods for the ridge parameter k of RR: GCV [28],
HKB [29], and LW [30]. For PCR, we use cumulative percent
variance to select the number of principal components [38].
There are mainly three prediction techniques for software
defect prediction [15], which are as follows.
2 http://www.r-project.org./
 890 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY, VOL. 67, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2018

1) Cross-validation prediction: Training and testing data are TABLE II

CONDITION NUMBERS AND VIFS OF EXPERIMENTAL DATASETS
from the same version of a project. That is, defect predic-
tion models are built from partial data and used to test the
remaining data.
2) Cross-version prediction: The former version of the data
is used for training a model and the latter version is used
as a validation set to evaluate the model.
3) Cross-project prediction: Prediction models built from
one project are used to test data of another project.
Considering different versions of the same software project
might have similar parameter distribution among files [15], we
use cross-version prediction in this paper. The former version of
the data is used to build the model and the latter version is used
as a validation set to evaluate the model. For example, we use
ant-1.3 to train a model and use the model to predict ant-1.4.
Because metrics with only one value can cause “NAN” values in
the scale matrix, which is needed in some regression methods,
we delete these metrics before applying the model construction
methods.
Because some methods such as RF are not deterministic ap-
proaches (that is, they may obtain different results over the same
training and testing datasets), all methods run ten times for the
same set of data. As a result, we obtain ten results for each
method over each set of training and testing data. The Wilcoxon
rank-sum test [39] (we call it as ranksum for short in the rest
of paper) is used as the statistical test. Ranksum is a nonpara-
metric test of the null hypothesis that two populations are the
same against an alternative hypothesis that a particular popula-
tion tends to have larger values than the other. To be specific,
ranksum is used to test whether ten results by one method are
significantly larger than those by another method using the same
training and testing data. The sample size of ten per group is suf-
ficient for ranksum at 0.05 significance. We also use Wilcoxon
signed-rank test [40] to test the significance of the differences
between mean results achieved by the two methods over all
datasets.

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
In this section, we show the experimental results. First, we
detect the degree of multicollinearity in experimental datasets.
Subsequently, we show the comparison of RR and LAR with LR
and NBR for sorting modules in order of defect count. After that,
the comparison results of RR and LAR with PCR are shown.
Finally, the comparison of RR and LAR with RF and LTR is
reported, and the model construction time is shown.
A. Multicollinearity in Experimental Datasets
In this section, we compute condition numbers and VIFs of
our experimental datasets. There are 20 metrics, so there are 20
VIF values for each dataset. We record the maximum VIFs and
average VIFs. Results are shown in Table II.
According to He’s definition [13], when the condition number
is larger than 100, there exists severe multicollinearity. Accord-
ing to Dereny and Rashwan [27], when VIF is larger than 10,
there exists high multicollinearity. From Table II, all condi-
tion numbers are larger than 1000, and all average VIFs are
larger than 10, not to mention maximum VIFs. Therefore, all
experimental datasets have serious multicollinearity problems
according to both condition numbers and VIFs.
B. Comparison of RR and LAR With LR and NBR
LR [7], [17] and NBR [1], [6] are popular methods for sort-
ing software modules in order of defect count. However, mul-
ticollinearity, particularly severe multicollinearity, might cause
unsteady inverse matrix. When the LR or generalized LR uses
the unsteady inverse matrix, it might result in poor performance
of prediction models. Section V-A have proved that there ex-
ist multicollinearity problems over all the experimental data.
Hence, it might be inappropriate to directly use ordinary LR or
NBR. In this case, biased estimation methods such as RR [12]
and LAR [14], which can deal with multicollinearity problems,
should be good options. Therefore, in this section, we show the
comparison results of four regression models: RR, LAR, LR,
and NBR, in order to investigate whether the two biased estima-
tion methods (RR and LAR) can outperform LR and NBR over
these datasets.

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 YANG AND WEN: RIDGE AND LASSO REGRESSION MODELS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
TABLE III
MEAN FPA AND CLC RESULTS OF RR, LAR, NBR, AND LR MODELS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
Because there are different ways for choosing a ridge parame-
ter of RR, we also compare three choices for the ridge parameter:
GCV [28], HKB [29], and LW [30], in order to study the best
choice for the ridge parameter when applying RR for software
defect prediction.
As mentioned in Section IV, we adopt the area under CLC
[17], [37] and FPA as performance measures. These four com-
pared regression methods in this section are deterministic ap-
proaches. That is, when using the same training and testing
data, they obtain the same results. Hence, the ten results in ten
runs for each set of data are the same, and the variances of
these ten results are zero. If result A is larger than result B, A
is significantly larger than B. Mean FPA and CLC results of
these regression models are shown in Table III. Ant-1.3-1.4 in
Table III means using ant-1.3 as the training set and ant-1.4 as the
testing set, and others are similar. RR-GCV means using GCV
to decide the ridge parameter of RR, and others are similar. The
best FPA and CLC results achieved by these regression models
are in bold type. The row of “maximum times” records the times
of achieving maximum FPA or CLC values by the correspond-
ing methods. The row of “compare with NBR” summarizes the
comparison results of the corresponding method with NBR over
each set of data. For example, “24-0-6” in column “RR-GCV”
means that compared with NBR, RR-GCV performs better over
24 sets of data, equally over no sets of data, and worse over 6
sets of data. The row of “compare with LR” summarizes the
comparison results of the corresponding method with LR over
each set of data. The row of “total mean” records the mean
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891
results of the corresponding method over all the sets of data.
The row of “final with NBR” records the p-values of Wilcoxon
signed-rank test for mean results achieved by the corresponding
method and NBR over all the sets of data. The rows of “final
with LR” and “final with LAR” are similar.
As pointed out in the previous work [3], CLC and FPA are
consistent to evaluate a ranking. From Table III, RR performs
better than NBR in 24 out of 30 sets of data, and LAR per-
forms better than NBR in 25 out of 30 sets of data. Compared
with LR, RR, and LAR perform better in no less than 19 out
of 30 sets of data. Therefore, RR and LAR perform better than
LR and NBR in most cases. According to the p-values in the
rows of “final with NBR” and “final with LR”, RR, and LAR
achieve significantly better results than LR and NBR at the
0.05 significance level. This implies that RR and LAR are more
appropriate than LR and NBR for software defect prediction
when there exists multicollinearity. Considering the severe mul-
ticollinearity problem in other datasets in our previous work [3],
multicollinearity might be a common problem in software de-
fect prediction. In such a case, we recommend using RR or LAR
to deal with multicollinearity problems instead of using LR and
NBR.
Compared with LAR, RR-GCV performs better over 19 sets
of data, equally over 1 set of data, and worse over 10 sets of
data. RR-LW performs better over 19 sets of data, and worse
over 11 sets of data than LAR. RR-HKB performs better over
18 and worse over 12 sets of data than LAR. However, the
times of achieving maximum FPA or CLC values by RR and
 892
TABLE IV
MEAN FPA AND CLC RESULTS OF RR, LAR, AND PCR MODELS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
LAR are similar (8,7,5,6). According to the p-values in the
last row in Table III, the difference between RR results and
LAR results are not significant at the 0.05 significance level.
Therefore, RR is slightly better than LAR in general, but not
significantly.
The total mean of RR-GCV is slightly larger than RR-LW and
RR-HKB. Compared with RR-GCV, RR-LW performs better
over 14 sets of data, equally over 2 sets of data, and worse over
14 sets of data. RR-HKB performs better over 12 sets, equally
over 1 set, and worse over 17 sets of data than RR-GCV. RR-
HKB performs better over 13 sets, equally over 2 sets, and worse
over 15 sets of data than RR-LW. In addition, the p-values of
any two of these three RR models are larger than 0.4. Therefore,
GCV is slightly better for choosing the ridge parameter of RR
for software defect prediction, but not significantly.
C. Comparison of RR and LAR With PCR
In this section, we compare RR and LAR with a PCA-based
method: PCR. PCA is a powerful tool for analyzing data and
compressing data [41]. PCA can convert the original metrics
into a new set of metrics that are linearly uncorrelated, without
much loss of information. In this experiment, cumulative per-
cent variances at 0.9 and 0.99 are used to select the number of
principal components [38].
When the number of principal components is fixed, PCR is
also a deterministic approach, which obtains the same results
when using the same training and testing data, so the variance
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY, VOL. 67, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2018
of ten results achieved by PCR is also zero. Mean FPA and CLC
results of RR, LAR, and PCR models are shown in Table IV.
The “PCR9” means that the number of principal components
for PCR is decided by cumulative percent variances at 0.9, and
the “PCR99” means that the number of principal components
for PCR is decided by cumulative percent variances at 0.99. The
best FPA and CLC results achieved by these regression models
are in bold type. The row of “maximum times” records the times
of achieving maximum FPA or CLC values by the corresponding
methods. The rows of “compare with PCR9” and “compare with
PCR99” summarize the comparison results of the corresponding
method with PCR9 and PCR99, respectively, over each set of
data. The row of “total mean” records the mean results of the
corresponding method over all the sets of data. The row of
“final with PCR9” / “final with PCR99” records the p-values
of Wilcoxon signed-rank test for mean results achieved by the
corresponding method and PCR9/PCR99, respectively, over all
the sets of data.
As illustrated in Table IV, RR performs better than PCR in
no less than 17 out of 30 sets of data, and LAR performs better
than PCR in 16 out of 30 sets of data. That is, RR and LAR
perform better than LR and NBR in more sets of data. The total
mean of RR is slightly larger than PCR. However, LAR and
PCR99 achieve more times of maximum FPA or CLC values. In
addition, according to the p-values in the last two rows, there are
no significant differences between RR/LAR with PCR results
over all the sets of data. Therefore, RR is slightly better than
PCR in general, but not significantly.
 YANG AND WEN: RIDGE AND LASSO REGRESSION MODELS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
TABLE V
MEAN FPA AND CLC RESULTS OF RR, LAR, RF, AND LTR MODELS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
As mentioned above, PCA converts the original metrics into
a new set of metrics, so the vector of estimated coefficients us-
ing ordinary least-squares regression correspond to the selected
principal components instead of original metrics. Hence, we
need to transform this vector back to get the final PCR estimator
in order to describe the relationship between defects and origi-
nal metrics, and to predict new software modules, whereas, RR
and LAR do not need converting or transforming, because the
models describe directly the relationship between defects and
original metrics. In addition to the slightly better performance
of RR in Table IV, RR is a good choice for cross-version defect
prediction.
D. Comparison of RR and LAR With RF and LTR
In our previous work [3], RF and LTR performed best among
the compared methods for sorting software modules in order of
defect count. In order to investigate whether RR or LAR is a
good method for sorting modules in order of defect count, we
show the comparison of RR and LAR with RF and LTR. Table V
shows the mean calculated over ten testing FPA and CLC results
in ten runs. To be noted, because the variances are not zero for
RF or LTR models, the largest results might be not significantly
larger than other results, and thus, the largest FPA and CLC
results are not shown in bold type and the row of “maximum
times” is not recorded in Table V. The rows of “compare with
RF” and “compare with LTR” record the comparison results of
the corresponding method with RF and LTR. For example, “13-
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893
2–15” in column “RR-GCV” means that compared with RF, RR-
GCV performs significantly better over 13 sets of data, equally
over 2 sets of data, and worse over 15 sets of data. Ranksum at
0.05 significance is used to test whether or not results of one
method are significantly better than another method in ten runs
over each set of data. The row of “total mean” records the mean
results of the corresponding method over all sets of data. The
row of “final with RF”/“final with LTR” records the p-values
of Wilcoxon signed-rank test for mean results achieved by the
corresponding method and RF/LTR, respectively, over all the
sets of data.
Compared with LTR, RR-GCV performs no worse in 19 out
of 30 sets, RR-LW performs no worse in 20 out of 30 sets, RR-
HKB performs no worse in 21 out of 30 sets of data, and LAR
performs no worse in 15 out of 30 sets of data. The total mean
of RR is larger than LTR, but the total mean of LAR is smaller
than LTR. The p-values of RR/LAR with LTR are larger than
0.08. Therefore, RR models achieve slightly better results, and
LAR models achieve slightly worse results than LTR, but not
significantly.
Shih [42] pointed out that RF could deal well with correla-
tion and high-order interactions, and recommended to use RF
when working with highly-correlated data or data with many
interactions . It means that RF can handle the multicollinearity
problems. As given in Table V, the total mean of RF models is
even larger than RR. Nevertheless, according to the p-values,
there is no significant difference between RR results and RF
results at 0.05 significance level. Therefore, RR can achieve
 894
TABLE VI
MEAN MODEL CONSTRUCTION TIME (IN SECONDS) OF ALL METHODS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
comparable results with RF. Considering that it is more difficult
for RF models to interpret the relationship between defects and
original metrics, RR is still a good choice.
Table VI shows the mean model construction time in ten runs
of all compared methods in our experiments. The row of “mean
time” records the mean time of the corresponding method over
all sets of data. The row of “final with RR-GCV” records the
p-values of Wilcoxon signed-rank test for mean results achieved
by the corresponding method and RR-GCV over all sets of data.
From Table VI, the model construction time of RR-LW, RR-
HKB, or PCR99 is not significantly different from that of RR-
GCV. LR costs least time to build models among these methods.
LTR, RF, NBR, and LAR cost more time to construct defect
prediction models than RR-GCV.
E. Discussion
In this section, we summarize the above experimental results.
There exist severe multicollinearity problems in all exper-
imental datasets according to both condition numbers and
VIFs. Considering the serious multicollinearity problem in other
datasets in our previous work [3], multicollinearity might be a
common problem in software defect prediction.
The comparison of RR with other methods can be summa-
rized in Table VII. “Worse” in Table VII means that, compared
with RR, the corresponding method performs worse. Others are
similar.
RR can achieve better results than LR and NBR, slightly
(not significantly) better results than LAR, PCR and LTR, and
slightly (not significantly) worse results than RF. It is easier
for RR models than RF to interpret the relationship between
defects and original metrics. And RR is a deterministic method,
whereas RF is a nondeterministic method, which cannot produce
the same model when using the same training data. In addition,
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY, VOL. 67, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2018
RR costs less time to construct models than LTR, RF, NBR,
and LAR. Therefore, RR is a good choice for software defect
prediction for the ranking task when multicollinearity problems
exist.
GCV is slightly better for choosing the ridge parameter of
RR for software defect prediction than LW and HKB , but not
significantly.
LAR also performs better than LR and NBR, and achieves
comparable results with PCR and LTR. Compared with RF,
LAR performs worse, but LAR costs less construction time and
its model is easier to interpret the relationship between defects
and original metrics. As mentioned in Section III, LAR shrinks
ordinary least-squares estimator toward zero and potentially sets
some coefficients to zero [31], so LAR can perform as a variable
selection operator. The merits of LAR and RF are different.
To sum up, compared with LR and NBR, all other compared
methods (RR, LAR, PCR, RF, and LTR) can deal with multi-
collinearity problems in a degree. When considering only the
model performance, RF and RR are better for software defect
prediction for the ranking task when multicollinearity problems
exist. From the three aspects of model performance, interpreta-
tion and construction time, RR is a good choice. Among three
compared algorithms (GCV, LW, and HKB) for selecting the
ridge parameter, GCV is slightly better.
VI. THREATS TO VALIDITY
In order to simulate real applications, we use 11 open-source
projects including 41 versions in the PROMISE repository [15]
to conduct experiments. We use a former version of projects to
train models and use the models to predict the latter version.
In order to investigate the performance of RR and LAR, we
compare them with ordinary LR, generalized linear regression
(NBR), one PCA-based method, and two best methods in our
 YANG AND WEN: RIDGE AND LASSO REGRESSION MODELS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
TABLE VII
COMPARISON OF RR WITH ALL OTHER METHODS FOR CROSS-VERSION DEFECT PREDICTION
previous study (RF and LTR). All of these make us confident that
the obtained results are strongly related to the software defect
prediction domain, and the results are convincing. However,
some potential threats to validity should be considered.
A. Threats to Internal Validity
One threat is the choice of parameters. The best parameter
might be different for each dataset. In this paper, we simply set
the parameters of four compared methods according to our pre-
vious work [3]. In addition, only cumulative percent variances
at 0.9 and 0.99 are used to select the number of principal com-
ponents for PCR, the lasso solution is computed only by least
angle regression, and only three methods are used for selecting
the parameter of RR. These parameters might not be the best
parameters, and these methods might not be the best methods.
The results might be different when using different parameters
or different methods.
Another threat to the validity is the choice of the model per-
formance measures. We adopt the area under CLC (also referred
to as Alberg diagram) [17], [37] and FPA [6] as the performance
measures, because this paper focuses on software defect predic-
tion for the ranking task instead of classification task. However,
there exist other performance measures. For example, percent-
age of defects found in the top 20% modules is a performance
measure for software defect prediction for the ranking task. The
conclusion might be different when adopting other performance
measures.
B. Threats to External Validity
The main threat to external validity is experimental data.
Our experiments are based on a large collection of publicly
available datasets, so the conclusions should be convincing.
However, these datasets are only a very small part of all datasets
in real world. It is not necessary that all datasets have severe
multicollinearity problems, and the conclusions over these 41
datasets might not hold for other datasets, especially when other
datasets have no multicollinearity problems.
VII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
Sorting software modules in order of defect count is very
important because it can help software developers to allocate
testing resources effectively and efficiently. Generalized LR ap-
proaches including LR have been popularly used and have been
demonstrated to be effective for this task. However, our previous
study showed that these regression approaches did not perform
well over datasets having multicollinearity problems [3]. In this
paper, we investigate 11 open-source projects (including 41 ver-
sions) in the PROMISE repository, and find that these datasets
also have multicollinearity problems. Considering that biased
estimation methods can achieve better prediction without data
processing for multicollinearity problems, we employ two fa-
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895
mous biased estimation methods (RR [12], [13] and LAR [14])
for sorting software modules in order of defect count over cross-
version datasets. Our experimental results show the following
conclusions.
1) According to both condition numbers and VIFs, all of
these experimental datasets have severe multicollinear-
ity problems. Considering the serious multicollinearity
problem in other datasets in our previous work [3], mul-
ticollinearity might be a common problem in software
defect prediction, and the problem should be solved.
2) RR and LAR perform better than LR and NBR over
most experimental datasets. It implies that RR and LAR
can overcome the multicollinearity problems over these
datasets. Optimistically, it might imply that RR and LAR
can deal with multicollinearity problems in software de-
fect prediction domain.
3) When considering only the model performance, RF and
RR are better for software defect prediction for the rank-
ing task when multicollinearity problems exist. From the
three aspects of model performance, interpretation and
construction time, RR is an attractive approach to sort
software modules according to the number of defects.
4) The difference among the compared methods for selecting
the ridge parameter is not very significant. Nevertheless,
GCV is slightly better for choosing the ridge parameter of
RR for software defect prediction.
In general, RR and RF can perform best among all methods
without data processing, according to our experimental results.
Compared with RF, the merits of RR include: RR is a determin-
istic approach, it costs less time to construct RR models, and it
is easy for RR models to interpret the relationship between de-
fects and metrics. In our previous work [3], when using variable
selection to select three metrics, LTR performed better than RF.
However, RF without variable selection achieved larger FPA
results than LTR using variable selection in most cases. There-
fore, the conclusion that RR achieves comparable results with
RF without variable selection, might imply that RR also achieves
comparable results with LTR using variable selection. In our fu-
ture work, we will further investigate the choice of parameters
of biased estimation methods for software defect prediction and
compare them with more methods (including variable selection
methods and variable redefinition methods).
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Xiaoxing Yang received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees
in computer science from the University of Science
and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
She is currently an Associate Research Fellow
with the School of Data and Computer Science, Sun
Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China. Her research
interests include software defect prediction, machine
learning, evolutionary computation, and cloud com-
puting.
Wushao Wen received the B.S. degree from the Uni-
versity of Science and Technology of China, Hefei,
China, in 1993 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from
the University of California, Davis, CA, USA, in 1999
and 2001, respectively.
He is currently a Professor with the School of
Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-Sen University,
China. He was an Engineer and a Project Manager
with China Telecommunication, Inc., from 1993 to
1997. From 2000 to 2001, he was an Engineer with
Cisco Systems, Inc., USA. From 2001 to 2004, he was
a Senior Engineer with CIENA Corporation, Cupertino, CA, leading the design
and implementation of optical routing and signaling systems. He was a Senior
Networking Expert with McAfee, Inc., from 2004 to 2006 and a Staff Engineer
with Juniper Networks from 2006 to 2009 in the network intrusion detection
area. He has been a Professor with Sun Yat-Sen University since 2009 and was
appointed as the Chief Director of the Networks and Information Center, the
Director of Shared Experimentation Teaching Center, Sun Yat-Sen University,
China, in 2013, and 2014, respectively. He is currently doing research in cloud
computing, network security, network architectures, and multimedia networks.