<![CDATA[Cross-project defect prediction (CPDP) aims to predict software defects in a target project using data from other projects. However, most existing CPDP approaches rely on complex frameworks, such as transfer learning or sophisticated multi-source integration, making them difficult to reproduce and apply in practical software engineering environments. This study proposes a simple yet integrated hybrid preprocessing pipeline consisting of feature normalization, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), SMOTE–Tomek balancing, and decision threshold tuning to improve CPDP performance on the AEEEM dataset. Experiments were conducted under both single-source and multi-source CPDP scenarios using Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers. Performance was evaluated using the F1 Score and the Area Under the Curve (AUC). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach improves prediction performance, particularly under the multi-source CPDP scenario. Compared with the more complex MSCPDP approach, the proposed method achieved a higher F1-score on four out of five target projects and consistently outperformed MSCPDP on all five projects in terms of AUC. Furthermore, the experimental analysis indicates that decision threshold tuning contributed more significantly to performance improvement than class balancing alone. In contrast, the combination of threshold tuning and SMOTE–Tomek yielded the best overall performance. These findings provide empirical evidence that a simple, reproducible preprocessing pipeline can effectively improve CPDP performance without requiring complex learning frameworks.]]>
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