Prediction of Software Defects Using Automated Machine Learning

The effectiveness of defect prediction depends on modeling techniques as well as their parameter optimization, data preprocessing and ensemble development. This paper focuses on auto-sklearn, which is a recently-developed software library for automated machine learning, that can automatically select appropriate prediction models, hyperparameters and data preprocessing techniques for a given data set and develop their ensemble with optimized weights. In this paper we empirically evaluate the effectiveness of auto-sklearn in predicting the number of defects in software modules. In the experiment, we used software metrics of 20 OSS projects for cross-release defect prediction and compared auto-sklearn with random forest, decision tree and linear discriminant analysis by using Norm(Popt) as a performance measure. As a result, auto-sklearn showed similar prediction performance as random forest, which is one of the best prediction models for defect prediction in past studies. This indicates that auto-sklearn can obtain good prediction performance for defect prediction without any knowledge of machine learning techniques and models.