Application of mutual information-based sequential feature selection to ISBSG mixed data

[EN] There is still little research work focused on feature selection (FS) techniques including both categorical and continuous features in Software Development Effort Estimation (SDEE) literature. This paper addresses the problem of selecting the most relevant features from ISBSG (International Software Benchmarking Standards Group) dataset to be used in SDEE. The aim is to show the usefulness of splitting the ranked list of features provided by a mutual information-based sequential FS approach in two, regarding categorical and continuous features. These lists are later recombined according to the accuracy of a case-based reasoning model. Thus, four FS algorithms are compared using a complete dataset with 621 projects and 12 features from ISBSG. On the one hand, two algorithms just consider the relevance, while the remaining two follow the criterion of maximizing relevance and also minimizing redundancy between any independent feature and the already selected features. On the other hand, the algorithms that do not discriminate between continuous and categorical features consider just one list, whereas those that differentiate them use two lists that are later combined. As a result, the algorithms that use two lists present better performance than those algorithms that use one list. Thus, it is meaningful to consider two different lists of features so that the categorical features may be selected more frequently. We also suggest promoting the usage of Application Group, Project Elapsed Time, and First Data Base System features with preference over the more frequently used Development Type, Language Type, and Development Platform.Fernández-Diego, M.; González-Ladrón-De-Guevara, F. (2018). Application of mutual information-based sequential feature selection to ISBSG mixed data. Software Quality Journal. 26(4):1299-1325. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-017-9391-5S12991325264Angelis, L., & Stamelos, I. (2000). A simulation tool for efficient analogy based cost estimation. Empirical Software Engineering, 5(1), 35–68. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009897800559 .Auer, M., Trendowicz, A., Graser, B., Haunschmid, E., & Biffl, S. (2006). Optimal project feature weights in analogy-based cost estimation: improvement and limitations. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 32(2), 83–92.Awada, W., Khoshgoftaar, T. M., Dittman, D., Wald, R., Napolitano, A. (2012). A review of the stability of feature selection techniques for bioinformatics data. In 2012 I.E. 13th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI) (pp. 356–363). Presented at the 2012 I.E. 13th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI). https://doi.org/10.1109/IRI.2012.6303031 .Battiti, R. (1994). Using mutual information for selecting features in supervised neural net learning. Neural Networks, IEEE Transactions, 5(4), 537–550.Bennasar, M., Hicks, Y., & Setchi, R. (2015). Feature selection using joint mutual information maximisation. Expert Systems with Applications, 42(22), 8520–8532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2015.07.007 .Bibi, S., Tsoumakas, G., Stamelos, I., & Vlahavas, I. (2008). Regression via classification applied on software defect estimation. Expert Systems with Applications, 34(3), 2091–2101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2007.02.012 .Chandrashekar, G., & Sahin, F. (2014). A survey on feature selection methods. Computers & Electrical Engineering, 40(1), 16–28.Chatzipetrou, P., Papatheocharous, E., Angelis, L., Andreou, A. S. (2012). An investigation of software effort phase distribution using compositional data analysis. In 2012 38th EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) (pp. 367–375). Presented at the 2012 38th EUROMICRO Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA). https://doi.org/10.1109/SEAA.2012.50 .Chen, Z., Menzies, T., Port, D., & Boehm, B. (2005). Feature subset selection can improve software cost estimation accuracy. In Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on predictor models in software engineering (pp. 1–6). New York: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1082983.1083171 .Chiu, N.-H., & Huang, S.-J. (2007). The adjusted analogy-based software effort estimation based on similarity distances. Journal of Systems and Software, 80(4), 628–640.Dash, M., & Liu, H. (2003). Consistency-based search in feature selection. Artificial Intelligence, 151(1), 155–176.Dejaeger, K., Verbeke, W., Martens, D., & Baesens, B. (2012). Data mining techniques for software effort estimation: a comparative study. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 38(2), 375–397. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2011.55 .Deng, K., & MacDonell, S. G. (2008). Maximising data retention from the ISBSG repository. In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on evaluation and assessment in software engineering (pp. 21–30). Swinton: British Computer Society http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2227115.2227118 . Accessed 21 Jan 2014.Doquire, G., & Verleysen, M. (2011). An hybrid approach to feature selection for mixed categorical and continuous data. In International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval. http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/90765 . Accessed 2 Nov 2015.Dudani, S. A. (1976). The distance-weighted k-nearest-neighbor rule. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, SMC, 6(4), 325–327. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMC.1976.5408784 .Estévez, P. A., Tesmer, M., Perez, C. A., & Zurada, J. M. (2009). Normalized mutual information feature selection. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 20(2), 189–201. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNN.2008.2005601 .Fayyad, U.M., & Irani, K.B. (1993). Multi-Interval Discretization of Continuous-Valued Attributes for Classification Learning. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Uncertainty in AI (pp. 1022–1027). Presented at the International Joint Conference on Uncertainty in AI. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220815890_Multi-Interval_Discretization_of_Continuous-Valued_Attributes_for_Classification_Learning . Accessed 22 June 2016.Fernández-Diego, M., & González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, F. (2014). Potential and limitations of the ISBSG dataset in enhancing software engineering research: a mapping review. Information and Software Technology, 56(6), 527–544. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2014.01.003 .Ferreira, A., & Figueiredo, M. (2011). Unsupervised joint feature discretization and selection. In J. Vitrià, J. M. Sanches, & M. Hernández (Eds.), Pattern recognition and image analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 200–207). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-642-21257-4_25 . Accessed 4 Mar 2016.Fleuret, F. (2004). Fast binary feature selection with conditional mutual information. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 5, 1531–1555.González-Ladrón-de-Guevara, F., Fernández-Diego, M., & Lokan, C. (2016). The usage of ISBSG data fields in software effort estimation: a systematic mapping study. Journal of Systems and Software, 113, 188–215. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2015.11.040 .Gupta, P., Jain, S., & Jain, A. (2014). A review of fast clustering-based feature subset selection algorithm. International Journal of Scientific & Technology Research, 3(11), 86–91.Guyon, I., & Elisseeff, A. (2003). An introduction to variable and feature selection. The Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3, 1157–1182.Hall, M. A., & Holmes, G. (2003). Benchmarking attribute selection techniques for discrete class data mining. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 15(6), 1437–1447. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2003.1245283 .Hausser, J., & Strimmer, K. (2009). Entropy inference and the James-Stein estimator, with application to nonlinear gene association networks. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 10(Jul), 1469–1484.Hill, P. (2010). Practical software project estimation: a toolkit for estimating software development effort & duration. McGraw Hill Professional.Hsu, H.-H., Hsieh, C.-W., & Lu, M.-D. (2011). Hybrid feature selection by combining filters and wrappers. Expert Systems with Applications, 38(7), 8144–8150.Huang, S.-J., & Chiu, N.-H. (2006). Optimization of analogy weights by genetic algorithm for software effort estimation. Information and Software Technology, 48(11), 1034–1045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2005.12.020 .Huang, S.-J., Chiu, N.-H., & Liu, Y.-J. (2008). A comparative evaluation on the accuracies of software effort estimates from clustered data. Information and Software Technology, 50(9–10), 879–888. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2008.02.005 .Huang, J., Li, Y.-F., & Xie, M. (2015). An empirical analysis of data preprocessing for machine learning-based software cost estimation. Information and Software Technology, 67, 108–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2015.07.004 .ISBSG. (2013a). ISBSG Dataset Release 12. ISBSG. http://isbsg.org/ . Accessed 1 Mar 2016.ISBSG. (2013b). ISBSG Guidelines Release 12.ISBSG. (2013c). ISBSG Data Demographics Release 12.Jeffery, R., Ruhe, M., Wieczorek, I. (2001). Using public domain metrics to estimate software development effort. In Software Metrics Symposium, 2001. METRICS 2001. Proceedings. Seventh International (pp. 16–27). https://doi.org/10.1109/METRIC.2001.915512 .Jiang, Z., & Comstock, C. (2007). The factors significant to software development productivity. In C. Ardil (Ed.), Proceedings of World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, Vol 19 (Vol. 19, pp. 160–164). Presented at the Conference of the World-Academy-of-Science-Engineering-and-Technology, Bangkok: World Acad Sci, Eng & Tech-Waset.Jørgensen, M., Indahl, U., & Sjøberg, D. (2003). Software effort estimation by analogy and ‘regression toward the mean’. Journal of Systems and Software, 68(3), 253–262. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0164-1212(03)00066-9 .Kabir, M. M., Shahjahan, M., & Murase, K. (2011). A new local search based hybrid genetic algorithm for feature selection. Neurocomputing, 74(17), 2914–2928.Kadoda, G., Cartwright, M., Chen, L., Shepperd, M. (2000). Experiences using case-based reasoning to predict software project effort. In EASE 2000 (pp. 2–3). Presented at the EASE 2000, Staffordshire, UK.Keung, J., Kocaguneli, E., & Menzies, T. (2012). Finding conclusion stability for selecting the best effort predictor in software effort estimation. Automated Software Engineering, 20(4), 543–567. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-012-0108-5 .Kirsopp, C., Shepperd, M. J., Hart, J. (2002). Search heuristics, case-based reasoning and software project effort prediction. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (pp. 9–13). New York, USA. http://v-scheiner.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/1554 . Accessed 27 Jan 2016.Kohavi, R., & John, G. H. (1997). Wrappers for feature subset selection. Artificial Intelligence, 97(1–2), 273–324. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0004-3702(97)00043-X .Kwak, N., & Choi, C.-H. (2002). Input feature selection for classification problems. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 13(1), 143–159. https://doi.org/10.1109/72.977291 .Langdon, W. B., Dolado, J., Sarro, F., & Harman, M. (2016). Exact mean absolute error of baseline predictor, MARP0. Information and Software Technology, 73, 16–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2016.01.003 .Li, Y. F., Xie, M., & Goh, T. N. (2009). A study of mutual information based feature selection for case based reasoning in software cost estimation. Expert Systems with Applications, 36(3), 5921–5931.Liu, H., & Motoda, H. (2012). Feature selection for knowledge discovery and data mining (Vol. 454). Springer Science & Business Media. https://books.google.es/books?hl=en&lr=&id=aaDbBwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP10&dq=Feature+selection+for+knowledge+discovery+and+data+mining&ots=iuMhcWZGcf&sig=KlmNEIcsBdDVs-m1HUuICfpYZiM . Accessed 25 Jan 2016.Liu, H., & Yu, L. (2005). Toward integrating feature selection algorithms for classification and clustering. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 17(4), 491–502. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2005.66 .Liu, H., Wei, R., & Jiang, G. (2013). A hybrid feature selection scheme for mixed attributes data. Computational and Applied Mathematics, 32(1), 145–161. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40314-013-0019-5 .Liu, Q., Wang, J., Xiao, J., Zhu, H. (2014). Mutual information based feature selection for symbolic interval data. In International Conference on Software Intelligence Technologies and Applications International Conference on Frontiers of Internet of Things 2014 (pp. 62–69). Presented at the International Conference on Software Intelligence Technologies and Applications International Conference on Frontiers of Internet of Things 2014. https://doi.org/10.1049/cp.2014.1537 .Lokan, C. (2005). What should you optimize when building an estimation model? In Software Metrics, 2005. 11th IEEE International Symposium (pp. 1–10). https://doi.org/10.1109/METRICS.2005.55 .Lokan, C., & Mendes, E. (2009a). Investigating the use of chronological split for software effort estimation. Software, IET, 3(5), 422–434. https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-sen.2008.0107 .Lokan, C., & Mendes, E. (2009b). Applying moving windows to software effort estimation. In Proceedings of the 2009 3rd international symposium on empirical software engineering and measurement (pp. 111–122). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society. https://doi.org/10.1109/ESEM.2009.5316019 .Lokan, C., & Mendes, E. (2012). Investigating the use of duration-based moving windows to improve software effort prediction. In Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), 2012 19th Asia-Pacific (Vol. 1, pp. 818–827). Presented at the Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), 2012 19th Asia-Pacific. https://doi.org/10.1109/APSEC.2012.74 .Lustgarten, J.L., Visweswaran, S., Grover, H., Gopalakrishnan, V. (2008). An evaluation of discretization methods for learning rules from biomedical datasets. In BIOCOMP (pp. 527–532).Mandal, M., & Mukhopadhyay, A. (2013). An improved minimum redundancy maximum relevance approach for feature selection in gene expression data. Procedia Technology, 10, 20–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.protcy.2013.12.332 .Mendes, E., Watson, I., Triggs, C., Mosley, N., & Counsell, S. (2003). A comparative study of cost estimation models for web hypermedia applications. Empirical Software Engineering, 8(2), 163–196.Mendes, E., Lokan, C., Harrison, R., Triggs, C. (2005). A replicated comparison of cross-company and within-company effort estimation models using the ISBSG database. In Software Metrics, 2005. 11th IEEE International Symposium (pp. 1–10). https://doi.org/10.1109/METRICS.2005.4 .Moses, J., Farrow, M., Parrington, N., & Smith, P. (2006). A productivity benchmarking case study using Bayesian credible intervals. Software Quality Journal, 14(1), 37–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-006-6000-4 .Núñez, H., Sànchez-Marrè, M., Cortés, U., Comas, J., Martínez, M., Rodríguez-Roda, I., & Poch, M. (2004). A comparative study on the use of similarity measures in case-based reasoning to improve the classification of environmental system situations. Environmental Modelling & Software, 19(9), 809–819. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2003.03.003 .Oh, I.-S., Lee, J.-S., & Moon, B.-R. (2004). Hybrid genetic algorithms for feature selection. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on, 26(11), 1424–1437.Peng, H., Long, F., & Ding, C. (2005). Feature selection based on mutual information criteria of max-dependency, max-relevance, and min-redundancy. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 27(8), 1226–1238. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2005.159 .R Core Team. (2015). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing https://www.R-project.org/ .Romanski, P., & Kotthoff, L. (2014). FSelector: Selecting attributes. R package version 0.20. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=FSelector .Shannon, C. E. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Shepperd, M., & MacDonell, S. (2012). Evaluating prediction systems in software project estimation. Information and Software Technology, 54(8), 820–827.Shepperd, M., & Schofield, C. (1997). Estimating software project effort using analogies. Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on, 23(11), 736–743.Somol, P., Pudil, P., & Kittler, J. (2004). Fast branch & bound algorithms for optimal feature selection. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on, 26(7), 900–912.Song, Q., & Shepperd, M. (2007). A new imputation method for small software project data sets. Journal of Systems and Software, 80(1), 51–62.Top, O. O., Ozkan, B., Nabi, M., Demirors, O. (2011). Internal and External Software Benchmark Repository Utilization for Effort Estimation. In Software Measurement, 2011 Joint Conference of the 21st Int’l Workshop on and 6th Int’l Conference on Software Process and Product Measurement (IWSM-MENSURA) (pp. 302–307). https://doi.org/10.1109/IWSM-MENSURA.2011.41 .Vinh, L.T., Thang, N.D., Lee, Y.-K. (2010). An improved maximum relevance and minimum redundancy feature selection algorithm based on normalized mutual information. In 2010 10th IEEE/IPSJ International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT) (pp. 395–398). Presented at the 2010 10th IEEE/IPSJ International Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT). https://doi.org/10.1109/SAINT.2010.50 .Witten, I.H., Frank, E., Hall, M.A., Pal, C.J. (2011). Data mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques. Morgan Kaufmann

Are screening methods useful in feature selection? An empirical study

Filter or screening methods are often used as a preprocessing step for reducing the number of variables used by a learning algorithm in obtaining a classification or regression model. While there are many such filter methods, there is a need for an objective evaluation of these methods. Such an evaluation is needed to compare them with each other and also to answer whether they are at all useful, or a learning algorithm could do a better job without them. For this purpose, many popular screening methods are partnered in this paper with three regression learners and five classification learners and evaluated on ten real datasets to obtain accuracy criteria such as R-square and area under the ROC curve (AUC). The obtained results are compared through curve plots and comparison tables in order to find out whether screening methods help improve the performance of learning algorithms and how they fare with each other. Our findings revealed that the screening methods were useful in improving the prediction of the best learner on two regression and two classification datasets out of the ten datasets evaluated.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figures, 21 table

Feature selection for chemical sensor arrays using mutual information

We address the problem of feature selection for classifying a diverse set of chemicals using an array of metal oxide sensors. Our aim is to evaluate a filter approach to feature selection with reference to previous work, which used a wrapper approach on the same data set, and established best features and upper bounds on classification performance. We selected feature sets that exhibit the maximal mutual information with the identity of the chemicals. The selected features closely match those found to perform well in the previous study using a wrapper approach to conduct an exhaustive search of all permitted feature combinations. By comparing the classification performance of support vector machines (using features selected by mutual information) with the performance observed in the previous study, we found that while our approach does not always give the maximum possible classification performance, it always selects features that achieve classification performance approaching the optimum obtained by exhaustive search. We performed further classification using the selected feature set with some common classifiers and found that, for the selected features, Bayesian Networks gave the best performance. Finally, we compared the observed classification performances with the performance of classifiers using randomly selected features. We found that the selected features consistently outperformed randomly selected features for all tested classifiers. The mutual information filter approach is therefore a computationally efficient method for selecting near optimal features for chemical sensor arrays