Within‐project and cross‐project just‐in‐time defect prediction based on denoising autoencoder and convolutional neural network

Just‐in‐time defect prediction is an important and useful branch in software defect prediction. At present, deep learning is a research hotspot in the field of artificial intelligence, which can combine basic defect features into deep semantic features and make up for the shortcomings of machine learning algorithms. However, the mainstream deep learning techniques have not been applied yet in just‐in‐time defect prediction. Therefore, the authors propose a novel just‐in‐time defect prediction model named DAECNN‐JDP based on denoising autoencoder and convolutional neural network in this study, which has three main advantages: (i) Different weights for the position vector of each dimension feature are set, which can be automatically trained by adaptive trainable vector. (ii) Through the training of denoising autoencoder, the input features that are not contaminated by noise can be obtained, thus learning more robust feature representation. (iii) The authors leverage a powerful representation‐learning technique, convolution neural network, to construct the basic change features into the abstract deep semantic features. To evaluate the performance of the DAECNN‐JDP model, they conduct extensive within‐project and cross‐project defect prediction experiments on six large open source projects. The experimental results demonstrate that the superiority of DAECNN‐JDP on five evaluation metrics.