{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/the-impact-of-automated-parameter","title":"The Impact of Automated Parameter Optimization on Defect Prediction Models","arxiv_id":"1801.10270","date":"2018-01-31","proceeding":null,"authors":["Chakkrit Tantithamthavorn","Shane McIntosh","Ahmed E. Hassan","Kenichi Matsumoto"],"abstract":"Defect prediction models---classifiers that identify defect-prone software modules---have configurable parameters that control their characteristics (e.g., the number of trees in a random forest). Recent studies show that these classifiers underperform when default settings are used. In this paper, we study the impact of automated parameter optimization on defect prediction models. Through a case study of 18 datasets, we find that automated parameter optimization: (1) improves AUC performance by up to 40 percentage points; (2) yields classifiers that are at least as stable as those trained using default settings; (3) substantially shifts the importance ranking of variables, with as few as 28% of the top-ranked variables in optimized classifiers also being top-ranked in non-optimized classifiers; (4) yields optimized settings for 17 of the 20 most sensitive parameters that transfer among datasets without a statistically significant drop in performance; and (5) adds less than 30 minutes of additional computation to 12 of the 26 studied classification techniques. While widely-used classification techniques like random forest and support vector machines are not optimization-sensitive, traditionally overlooked techniques like C5.0 and neural networks can actually outperform widely-used techniques after optimization is applied. This highlights the importance of exploring the parameter space when using parameter-sensitive classification techniques.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1801.10270v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.10270v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"the-impact-of-automated-parameter","repo_url":"https://github.com/klainfo/ScottKnottESD","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}