COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SOFTWARE EFFORT ESTIMATION USING DATA MINING TECHNIQUE AND FEATURE SELECTION

Software development involves several interrelated factors that influence development efforts and productivity. Improving the estimation techniques available to project managers will facilitate more effective time and budget control in software development. Software Effort Estimation or software cost/effort estimation can help a software development company to overcome difficulties experienced in estimating software development efforts. This study aims to compare the Machine Learning method of Linear Regression (LR), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Radial Basis Function (RBF), and Decision Tree Random Forest (DTRF) to calculate estimated cost/effort software. Then these five approaches will be tested on a dataset of software development projects as many as 10 dataset projects. So that it can produce new knowledge about what machine learning and non-machine learning methods are the most accurate for estimating software business. As well as knowing between the selection between using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for attributes selection and without PSO, which one can increase the accuracy for software business estimation. The data mining algorithm used to calculate the most optimal software effort estimate is the Linear Regression algorithm with an average RMSE value of 1603,024 for the 10 datasets tested. Then using the PSO feature selection can increase the accuracy or reduce the RMSE average value to 1552,999. The result indicates that, compared with the original regression linear model, the accuracy or error rate of software effort estimation has increased by 3.12% by applying PSO feature selectio

Software Development Effort Estimation Using Regression Fuzzy Models

Software effort estimation plays a critical role in project management. Erroneous results may lead to overestimating or underestimating effort, which can have catastrophic consequences on project resources. Machine-learning techniques are increasingly popular in the field. Fuzzy logic models, in particular, are widely used to deal with imprecise and inaccurate data. The main goal of this research was to design and compare three different fuzzy logic models for predicting software estimation effort: Mamdani, Sugeno with constant output and Sugeno with linear output. To assist in the design of the fuzzy logic models, we conducted regression analysis, an approach we call regression fuzzy logic. State-of-the-art and unbiased performance evaluation criteria such as standardized accuracy, effect size and mean balanced relative error were used to evaluate the models, as well as statistical tests. Models were trained and tested using industrial projects from the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG) dataset. Results showed that data heteroscedasticity affected model performance. Fuzzy logic models were found to be very sensitive to outliers. We concluded that when regression analysis was used to design the model, the Sugeno fuzzy inference system with linear output outperformed the other models.Comment: This paper has been accepted in January 2019 in Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience Journal (In Press

Optimization of fuzzy analogy in software cost estimation using linguistic variables

One of the most important objectives of software engineering community has been the increase of useful models that beneficially explain the development of life cycle and precisely calculate the effort of software cost estimation. In analogy concept, there is deficiency in handling the datasets containing categorical variables though there are innumerable methods to estimate the cost. Due to the nature of software engineering domain, generally project attributes are often measured in terms of linguistic values such as very low, low, high and very high. The imprecise nature of such value represents the uncertainty and vagueness in their elucidation. However, there is no efficient method that can directly deal with the categorical variables and tolerate such imprecision and uncertainty without taking the classical intervals and numeric value approaches. In this paper, a new approach for optimization based on fuzzy logic, linguistic quantifiers and analogy based reasoning is proposed to improve the performance of the effort in software project when they are described in either numerical or categorical data. The performance of this proposed method exemplifies a pragmatic validation based on the historical NASA dataset. The results were analyzed using the prediction criterion and indicates that the proposed method can produce more explainable results than other machine learning methods.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures; Journal of Systems and Software, 2011. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1112.3877 by other author

Applying Absolute Residuals as Evaluation Criterion for Estimating the Development Time of Software Projects by Means of a Neuro-Fuzzy Approach

In the software development field, software practitioners expend between 30% and 40% more effort than is predicted. Accordingly, researchers have proposed new models for estimating the development effort such that the estimations of these models are close to actual ones. In this study, an application based on a new neuro-fuzzy system (NFS) is analyzed. The NFS accuracy was compared to that of a statistical multiple linear regression (MLR) model. The criterion for evaluating the accuracy of estimation models has mainly been the Magnitude of Relative Error (MRE), however, it was recently found that MRE is asymmetric, and the use of Absolute Residuals (AR) has been proposed, therefore, in this study, the accuracy results of the NFS and MLR were based on AR. After a statistical paired t-test was performed, results showed that accuracy of the New-NFS is statistically better than that of the MLR at the 99% confidence level. It can be concluded that a new-NFS could be used for predicting the effort of software development projects when they have been individually developed on a disciplined process.In the software development field, software practitioners expend between 30% and 40% more effort than is predicted. Accordingly, researchers have proposed new models for estimating the development effort such that the estimations of these models are close to actual ones. In this study, an application based on a new neuro-fuzzy system (NFS) is analyzed. The NFS accuracy was compared to that of a statistical multiple linear regression (MLR) model. The criterion for evaluating the accuracy of estimation models has mainly been the Magnitude of Relative Error (MRE), however, it was recently found that MRE is asymmetric, and the use of Absolute Residuals (AR) has been proposed, therefore, in this study, the accuracy results of the NFS and MLR were based on AR. After a statistical paired t-test was performed, results showed that accuracy of the New-NFS is statistically better than that of the MLR at the 99% confidence level. It can be concluded that a new-NFS could be used for predicting the effort of software development projects when they have been individually developed on a disciplined process

Effort estimation for object-oriented system using artificial intelligence techniques

Software effort estimation is a vital task in software engineering. The importance of effort estimation becomes critical during early stage of the software life cycle when the details of the software have not been revealed yet. The effort involved in developing a software product plays an important role in determining the success or failure. With the proliferation of software projects and the heterogeneity in their genre, there is a need for efficient effort estimation techniques to enable the project managers to perform proper planning of the Software Life Cycle activates. In the context of developing software using object-oriented methodologies, traditional methods and metrics were extended to help managers in effort estimation activity. There are basically some points approach, which are available for software effort estimation such as Function Point, Use Case Point, Class Point, Object Point, etc. In this thesis, the main goal is to estimate the effort of various software projects using Class Point Approach. The parameters are optimized using various artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), K-Nearest Neighbor Regression (KNN) and Radial Basis Function Network(RBFN), fuzzy logic with various clustering algorithms such as the Fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm, K-means clustering algorithm and Subtractive Clustering (SC) algorithm, such as to achieve better accuracy. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of software effort estimation using these various AI techniques has been provided. By estimating the software projects accurately, we can have software with acceptable quality within budget and on planned schedules