Cross-Project Aging-Related Bug Prediction Based on Transfer Learning and Class Imbalance Learning

Software aging results from aging-related bugs (ARBs) in long-running systems, that usually causes performance decline and system crashes. Since collecting ARB data is challenging due to its scarcity, it hinders the development of effective prediction models. Moreover, existing cross-project ARB prediction methods often ignore project-specific distribution differences and neglect class imbalance and overlap issues between ARB and non-ARB classes. In this paper, a hybrid approach that combines the balanced distribution adaptation (BDA), the improved subclass discriminant analysis (ISDA), and the self-paced ensemble under-sampling (SPE) techniques, called BISP in short, is proposed to address the aforementioned problems. The main idea behind BISP is first to use BDA to adaptively reduce the difference of projects' marginal distribution and conditional distribution, and then employ ISDA and SPE to alleviate the severe class imbalance together with class overlap. Experimental results obtained for six classifiers and six cross-project datasets show that compared with the state-of-the-art approaches TLAP and JDA-ISDA based on transfer learning, BISP improves the average balance by 34.8% and 2.3% and improves the average AUC by 26.5% and 8.4%, respectively. Compared with the deep learning approach SRLA, BISP can improve the average balance value by 5.1%.