Energy consumption is a fundamental concern in mobile application
development, bearing substantial significance for both developers and
end-users. Moreover, it is a critical determinant in the consumer's
decision-making process when considering a smartphone purchase. From the
sustainability perspective, it becomes imperative to explore approaches aimed
at mitigating the energy consumption of mobile devices, given the significant
global consequences arising from the extensive utilisation of billions of
smartphones, which imparts a profound environmental impact. Despite the
existence of various energy-efficient programming practices within the Android
platform, the dominant mobile ecosystem, there remains a need for documented
machine learning-based energy prediction algorithms tailored explicitly for
mobile app development. Hence, the main objective of this research is to
propose a novel neural network-based framework, enhanced by a metaheuristic
approach, to achieve robust energy prediction in the context of mobile app
development. The metaheuristic approach here plays a crucial role in not only
identifying suitable learning algorithms and their corresponding parameters but
also determining the optimal number of layers and neurons within each layer. To
the best of our knowledge, prior studies have yet to employ any metaheuristic
algorithm to address all these hyperparameters simultaneously. Moreover, due to
limitations in accessing certain aspects of a mobile phone, there might be
missing data in the data set, and the proposed framework can handle this. In
addition, we conducted an optimal algorithm selection strategy, employing 13
metaheuristic algorithms, to identify the best algorithm based on accuracy and
resistance to missing values. The comprehensive experiments demonstrate that
our proposed approach yields significant outcomes for energy consumption
prediction.Comment: The paper is submitted to a related journa