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Ranking-oriented defect prediction (RODP) ranks software modules to allocate limited testing resources to each module according to the predicted number of defects. Most RODP methods overlook that ranking a module with more defects incorrectly makes it difficult to successfully find all of the defects in the module due to fewer testing resources being allocated to the module, which results in much higher costs than incorrectly ranking the modules with fewer defects, and the numbers of defects in software modules are highly imbalanced in defective software datasets. Cost-sensitive learning is an effective technique in handling the cost issue and data imbalance problem for software defect prediction. However, the effectiveness of cost-sensitive learning has not been investigated in RODP models.

In this article, we propose a cost-sensitive ranking support vector machine (SVM) (CSRankSVM …