LIMCR: Less-Informative Majorities Cleaning Rule Based on Naïve Bayes for Imbalance Learning in Software Defect Prediction

Software defect prediction (SDP) is an effective technique to lower software module testing costs. However, the imbalanced distribution almost exists in all SDP datasets and restricts the accuracy of defect prediction. In order to balance the data distribution reasonably, we propose a novel resampling method LIMCR on the basis of Naive Bayes to optimize and improve the SDP performance. The main idea of LIMCR is to remove less-informative majorities for rebalancing the data distribution after evaluating the degree of being informative for every sample from the majority class. We employ 29 SDP datasets from the PROMISE and NASA dataset and divide them into two parts, the small sample size (the amount of data is smaller than 1100) and the large sample size (larger than 1100). Then we conduct experiments by comparing the matching of classifiers and imbalance learning methods on small datasets and large datasets, respectively. The results show the effectiveness of LIMCR, and LIMCR+GNB performs better than other methods on small datasets while not brilliant on large datasets.