117,706 research outputs found
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
Can k-NN imputation improve the performance of C4.5 with small software project data sets? A comparative evaluation
Missing data is a widespread problem that can affect the ability to use data to construct effective prediction systems. We investigate a common machine learning technique that can tolerate missing values, namely C4.5, to predict cost using six real world software project databases. We analyze the predictive performance after using the k-NN missing data imputation technique to see if it is better to tolerate missing data or to try to impute missing values and then apply the C4.5 algorithm. For the investigation, we simulated three missingness mechanisms, three missing data patterns, and five missing data percentages. We found that the k-NN imputation can improve the prediction accuracy of C4.5. At the same time, both C4.5 and k-NN are little affected by the missingness mechanism, but that the missing data pattern and the missing data percentage have a strong negative impact upon prediction (or imputation) accuracy particularly if the missing data percentage exceeds 40%
Transfer Learning for Improving Model Predictions in Highly Configurable Software
Modern software systems are built to be used in dynamic environments using
configuration capabilities to adapt to changes and external uncertainties. In a
self-adaptation context, we are often interested in reasoning about the
performance of the systems under different configurations. Usually, we learn a
black-box model based on real measurements to predict the performance of the
system given a specific configuration. However, as modern systems become more
complex, there are many configuration parameters that may interact and we end
up learning an exponentially large configuration space. Naturally, this does
not scale when relying on real measurements in the actual changing environment.
We propose a different solution: Instead of taking the measurements from the
real system, we learn the model using samples from other sources, such as
simulators that approximate performance of the real system at low cost. We
define a cost model that transform the traditional view of model learning into
a multi-objective problem that not only takes into account model accuracy but
also measurements effort as well. We evaluate our cost-aware transfer learning
solution using real-world configurable software including (i) a robotic system,
(ii) 3 different stream processing applications, and (iii) a NoSQL database
system. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve (a)
a high prediction accuracy, as well as (b) a high model reliability.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the 12th International
Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems
(SEAMS'17
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