## arXiv Analytics

### arXiv:1703.00132 [cs.SE]AbstractReferencesReviewsResources

#### Revisiting Unsupervised Learning for Defect Prediction

Published 2017-03-01Version 1

Collecting quality data from software projects can be time-consuming and expensive. Hence, some researchers explore "unsupervised" approaches to quality prediction that does not require labelled data. An alternate technique is to use "supervised" approaches that learn models from project data labelled with, say, "defective" or "not-defective".Most researchers use these supervised models since, it is argued, they can exploit more knowledge of the projects. At FSE'16, Yang et al. reported startling results where unsupervised defect predictors outperformed supervised predictors for effort-aware just-in-time defect prediction. If confirmed, these results would lead to a dramatic simplification of a seemingly complex task (data mining) that is widely explored in the SE literature. This paper repeats and refutes those results as follows. (1)There is much variability in the efficacy of the Yang et al. models so even with their approach, some supervised data is required to prune weaker models. (2)Their findings were grouped across $N$ projects. When we repeat their analysis on a project-by-project basis, supervised predictors are seen to work better. Even though this paper rejects the specific conclusions of Yang et al., we still endorse their general goal. In our our experiments, supervisedpredictors did not perform outstandingly better than unsupervised ones. Hence, they may indeed be some combination of unsupervisedlearners to achieve comparable performance to supervised. We therefore encourage others to work in this promising area.

Comments: 11 pages, 5 figures. Submitted to FSE2017
Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG