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Software defects can lead to undesired results. Correcting defects costs 50 % to 75 % of the total software development budgets. To predict defective files, a prediction model must be built with predictors (e.g., software metrics) obtained from either a project itself (within-project) or from other projects (cross-project). A universal defect prediction model that is built from a large set of diverse projects would relieve the need to build and tailor prediction models for an individual project. A formidable obstacle to build a universal model is the variations in the distribution of predictors among projects of diverse contexts (e.g., size and programming language). Hence, we propose to cluster projects based on the similarity of the distribution of predictors, and derive the rank transformations using quantiles of predictors for a cluster. We fit the universal model on the transformed data of 1,385 open source projects hosted on …