A comparison of model validation techniques for audio-visual speech recognition

This paper implements and compares the performance of a number of techniques proposed for improving the accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. As ASR that uses only speech can be contaminated by environmental noise, in some applications it may improve performance to employ Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR), in which recognition uses both audio information and mouth movements obtained from a video recording of the speaker’s face region. In this paper, model validation techniques, namely the holdout method, leave-one-out cross validation and bootstrap validation, are implemented to validate the performance of an AVSR system as well as to provide a comparison of the performance of the validation techniques themselves. A new speech data corpus is used, namely the Loughborough University Audio-Visual (LUNA-V) dataset that contains 10 speakers with five sets of samples uttered by each speaker. The database is divided into training and testing sets and processed in manners suitable for the validation techniques under investigation. The performance is evaluated using a range of different signal-to-noise ratio values using a variety of noise types obtained from the NOISEX-92 dataset

Software development effort estimation modeling using a combination of fuzzy-neural network and differential evolution algorithm

Software cost estimation has always been a serious challenge lying ahead of software teams that should be seriously considered in the early stages of a project. Lack of sufficient information on final requirements, as well as the existence of inaccurate and vague requirements, are among the main reasons for unreliable estimations in this area. Though several effort estimation models have been proposed over the recent decade, an increase in their accuracy has always been a controversial issue, and researchers' efforts in this area are still ongoing. This study presents a new model based on a hybrid of adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and differential evolution (DE) algorithm. This model tries to obtain a more accurate estimation of software development effort that is capable of presenting a better estimate within a wide range of software projects compared to previous works. The proposed method outperformed other optimization algorithms adopted from the genetic algorithm, evolutionary algorithms, meta-heuristic algorithms, and neuro-fuzzy based optimization algorithms, and could improve the accuracy using MMRE and PRED (0.25) criteria up to 7%

A New Architecture Based on Artificial Neural Network and PSO Algorithm for Estimating Software Development Effort

Software project management has always faced challenges that have often had a great impact on the outcome of projects in future. For this, Managers of software projects always seek solutions against challenges. The implementation of unguaranteed approaches or mere personal experiences by managers does not necessarily suffice for solving the problems. Therefore, the management area of software projects requires tools and means helping software project managers confront with challenges. The estimation of effort required for software development is among such important challenges. In this study, a neural-network-based architecture has been proposed that makes use of PSO algorithm to increase its accuracy in estimating software development effort. The architecture suggested here has been tested by several datasets. Furthermore, similar experiments were done on the datasets using various widely used methods in estimating software development. The results showed the accuracy of the proposed model. The results of this research have applications for researchers of software engineering and data mining

A New Architecture Based on Artificial Neural Network and PSO Algorithm for Estimating Software Development Effort

Software project management has always faced challenges that have often had a great impact on the outcome of projects in future. For this, Managers of software projects always seek solutions against challenges. The implementation of unguaranteed approaches or mere personal experiences by managers does not necessarily suffice for solving the problems. Therefore, the management area of software projects requires tools and means helping software project managers confront with challenges. The estimation of effort required for software development is among such important challenges. In this study, a neural-network-based architecture has been proposed that makes use of PSO algorithm to increase its accuracy in estimating software development effort. The architecture suggested here has been tested by several datasets. Furthermore, similar experiments were done on the datasets using various widely used methods in estimating software development. The results showed the accuracy of the proposed model. The results of this research have applications for researchers of software engineering and data mining

Open Hybrid Model: A New Ensemble Model for Software Development Cost Estimation

Given various features of a software project, it may face different administrative challenges requiring right decisions by software project managers. A major challenge is to estimate software development cost for which different methods have been proposed by many researchers. According to the literature, the capability of a proposed model or method is demonstrated in a specific set of software projects. Hence, the aim of this study is to present a model to take advantage of the capabilities of various software development cost estimation models and methods simultaneously. For this purpose, a new model called "open hybrid model" was proposed based on the firefly algorithm. The proposed model includes an extensible bank of estimation methods. The model also includes an extensible bank of rules to describe the relation between existing methods. Considering project conditions, the proposed model tries to find the best rule for combining estimation methods in the methods bank. Three datasets of real projects were used to evaluate the precision of the proposed model, and the results were compared with those of other 11 methods. The results were compared based on performance parmeters widely used to show the accuracy and stability of estimation models. According to the results, the open hybrid model was able to select the most appropriate methods present in the methods bank

A Review of Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

Speech is the most important tool of interaction among human beings. This has inspired researchers to study further on speech recognition and develop a computer system that is able to integrate and understand human speech. But acoustic noisy environment can highly contaminate audio speech and affect the overall recognition performance. Thus, Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) is designed to overcome the problems by utilising visual images which are unaffected by noise. The aim of this paper is to discuss the AVSR structures, which includes the front end processes, audio-visual data corpus used, recent works and accuracy estimation methods

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

Optimizing complexity weight parameter of use case points estimation using particle swarm optimization

Among algorithmic-based frameworks for software development effort estimation, Use Case Points I s one of the most used. Use Case Points is a well-known estimation framework designed mainly for object-oriented projects. Use Case Points uses the use case complexity weight as its essential parameter. The parameter is calculated with the number of actors and transactions of the use case. Nevertheless, use case complexity weight is discontinuous, which can sometimes result in inaccurate measurements and abrupt classification of the use case. The objective of this work is to investigate the potential of integrating particle swarm optimization (PSO) with the Use Case Points framework. The optimizer algorithm is utilized to optimize the modified use case complexity weight parameter. We designed and conducted an experiment based on real-life data set from three software houses. The proposed model’s accuracy and performance evaluation metric is compared with other published results, which are standardized accuracy, effect size, mean balanced residual error, mean inverted balanced residual error, and mean absolute error. Moreover, the existing models as the benchmark are polynomial regression, multiple linear regression, weighted case-based reasoning with (PSO), fuzzy use case points, and standard Use Case Points. Experimental results show that the proposed model generates the best value of standardized accuracy of 99.27% and an effect size of 1.15 over the benchmark models. The results of our study are promising for researchers and practitioners because the proposed model is actually estimating, not guessing, and generating meaningful estimation with statistically and practically significant