• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.361-371
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• 2013

Public domain defect data sets, such as NASA data sets which are available from the NASA MDP and PROMISE repositories, make it possible to compare the results of different defect prediction models by using the same data sets. This means that repeatable and general prediction models can be built. However, some recent studies have raised questions about the quality of two versions of NASA data set, and made new cleaned data sets by applying their data cleaning processes. We find that there are two ways in the NASA MDP versions to determine the defectiveness of a module, 0 or 1, and the two results are different in some cases. This serious problem, to our knowledge, has not been addressed in previous studies. To handle this ambiguity problem, we define two kinds of module defectiveness and two conditions that can be used to determine the ambiguous cases. We meticulously analyze 5 projects among the 13 NASA projects by using our ambiguity analysis method. The results show that JM1 and PC4 are the best projects with few ambiguous cases.