Software effort estimation using FAHP and weighted kernel LSSVM machine

Accurate software effort estimation is one of the key factors to a successful project by making a better software project plan. To improve the estimation accuracy of software effort, many studies usually aimed at proposing novel effort estimation methods or combining several approaches of the existing effort estimation methods. However, those researches did not consider the distribution of historical software project data which is an important part impacting to the effort estimation accuracy. In this paper, to improve effort estimation accuracy by least squares regression, we propose a data partitioning method by the accuracy measures, MRE and MER which are usually used to measure the effort estimation accuracy. Furthermore, the empirical experimentations are performed by using two industry data sets (the ISBSG Release 9 and the Bank data set which consists of the project data performed in a bank in Korea).

Watershed prioritization using morphometric analysis by MCDM approaches

Determining road handling priority is considered as a complicated multicriteria decision making problem. In so doing, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been widely used to weight the importance. Fuzziness and vagueness however, are typical in many decision-making problems, so that fuzzy sets could be integrated with the pairwise comparison as an extension of the AHP. This study uses Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and TOPSIS method in determining regencial road handling priority for road links under severe circumstances in Badung regency in Bali province. Data are taken from a previous study, which had also been conducted for Badung regencial road handling priority using the AHP and SK.NO.77/KPTS/Db/1990 method. The weights of main and sub criteria are determined using FAHP and subsequently the ranking of road links is determined using TOPSIS method. The AHP method gave somewhat different result to 'SK.NO.77/KPTS/Db/1990' method. On the other hand, FAHP and TOPSIS method produce the same result to 'SK.NO.77/KPTS/Db/1990' method. This is probably best explained by the fact that they similarly considered traffic volumes as the most significant factor. FAHP and TOPSIS method however, are preferred to the AHP and SK.NO.77/KPTS/Db/1990 method in determining regencial road handling priority in Badung regency.Abstrak. Prioritas penanganan jalan merupakan salah satu tugas berat dan penting yang dihadapi oleh pengambil keputusan pada pemerintah daerah. Pada kenyataannya, penentuan penanganan jalan dapat dilihat sebagai permasalahan pengambilan keputusan yang melibatkan banyak kriteria yang bersifat kompleks. Metode proses hirarki analitik (AHP) telah banyak digunakan untuk menentukan bobot kriteria di dalam penentuan prioritas penanganan jalan. Akan tetapi karena keragu-raguan merupakan hal yang lazim terjadi di dalam pengambilan keputusan, maka teknik fuzzy dapat dikombinasikan ke dalam metode AHP. Pada studi ini penentuan prioritas penanganan jalan kabupaten untuk kondisi rusak berat di Kabupaten Badung, Bali dilakukan dengan metode Fuzzy AHP (FAHP) dan TOPSIS. Data penelitian digunakan dari studi sebelumnya di Kabupaten Badung yang menggunakan metode AHP dan SK.NO.77/KPTS/Db/1990. Metode FAHP digunakan untuk pembobotan kriteria sedangkan metode TOPSIS digunakan untuk penentuan urutan ruas jalan yang akan mendapat penanganan. Metode AHP memberikan hasil yang sedikit berbeda dengan metode SK.NO.77/KPTS/Db/1990. Sementara itu FAHP dan metode TOPSIS memberikan hasil yang sama dengan metode SK.NO.77/KPTS/Db/1990. Hal ini kemungkinan karena kedua metode tersebut menggunakan volume lalu lintas sebagai faktor yang paling berpengaruh pada penelitian ini. FAHP dan metode TOPSIS lebih disarankan untuk digunakan di dalam penentuan prioritas penanganan jalan di Kabupaten Badung.

Prediction of software development is the key task for the effective management of any software industry. The accuracy and reliability of the prediction mechanisms used for the estimation of software development effort is also important. A series of experiments are conducted to gradually progress towards the improved accurate estimation of the software development effort. However, while conducting these experiments, it was found that the size of the training set was not sufficient to train a large and complex artificial neural network (ANN). To overcome the problem of the size of the available training data set, a novel multilayered architecture based on a neural network model is proposed. The accuracy of the proposed multi-layered model is assessed using different criteria, which proves the pre-eminence of the proposed model.

Studies in software effort estimation (SEE) have explored the use of hyper-parameter tuning for machine learning algorithms (MLA) to improve the accuracy of effort estimates. In other contexts random search (RS) has shown similar results to grid search, while being less computationally-expensive. In this paper, we investigate to what extent the random search hyper-parameter tuning approach affects the accuracy and stability of support vector regression (SVR) in SEE. Results were compared to those obtained from ridge regression models and grid search-tuned models. A case study with four data sets extracted from the ISBSG 2018 repository shows that random search exhibits similar performance to grid search, rendering it an attractive alternative technique for hyper-parameter tuning. RS-tuned SVR achieved an increase of 0.227 standardized accuracy (SA) with respect to default hyper-parameters. In addition, random search improved prediction stability of SVR models to a minimum ratio of 0.840. The analysis showed that RS-tuned SVR attained performance equivalent to GS-tuned SVR. Future work includes extending this research to cover other hyper-parameter tuning approaches and machine learning algorithms, as well as using additional data sets.

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 selection

Purpose The study aims to investigate the application of the data element market in software project management, focusing on improving effort estimation by addressing challenges faced by traditional methods. Design/methodology/approach This study proposes a solution based on feature selection, utilizing the data element market and reinforcement learning-based algorithms to enhance the accuracy of software effort estimation. It explores the application of the MARLFS algorithm, customizing improvements to the algorithm and reward function. Findings This study demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves more precise estimation compared to traditional methods, leveraging feature selection to guide project management in software development. Originality/value This study contributes to the field by offering a novel approach that com-bines the data element market, machine learning, and feature selection to improve software effort estimation, addressing limitations of traditional methods and providing insights for future research in project management.

Software development effort estimation (SDEE) generally involves leveraging the information about the effort spent in developing similar software in the past. Most organizations do not have access to sufficient and reliable forms of such data from past projects. As such, the existing SDEE methods suffer from low usage and accuracy. We propose an efficient SDEE method for open source software, which provides accurate and fast effort estimates. The significant contributions of our article are (i) novel SDEE software metrics derived from developer activity information of various software repositories, (ii) an SDEE dataset comprising the SDEE metrics’ values derived from approximately 13,000 GitHub repositories from 150 different software categories, and (iii) an effort estimation tool based on SDEE metrics and a software description similarity model . Our software description similarity model is basically a machine learning model trained using the PVA on the software product descriptions of GitHub repositories. Given the software description of a newly envisioned software, our tool yields an effort estimate for developing it. Our method achieves the highest standardized accuracy score of 87.26% (with Cliff’s δ = 0.88 at 99.999% confidence level) and 42.7% with the automatically transformed linear baseline model. Our software artifacts are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5095723.

Effort estimations are a crucial aspect of software development. The tasks should be completed before the start of any software project. Accurate estimations increase the chances of project success, and inaccurate information can lead to severe issues. This study systematically reviewed the literature on effort-estimating models from 2015-2024, identifying 69 relevant studies from various publications to compile information on various software work estimation models. This review aims to analyze the models proposed in the literature and their classification, the metrics used for accuracy measurement, the leading model that has been chiefly applied for effort estimation, and the benchmark datasets available. The study utilized 542 relevant articles on software development, cost, effort, prediction, estimation, and modelling techniques in the search strategy. After 194 selections, the authors chose 69 articles to understand ML applications in SEE comprehensively. The researchers used a scoring system to assess each study’s responses (from 0 to 5 points) to their research questions. This helped them identify credible studies with higher scores for a comprehensive review aligned with its objectives. The data extraction process identified 91% (63) of 69 studies as either highly or somewhat relevant, demonstrating a successful search strategy for analysis. The literature review on SEE indicates a growing preference for ML-based models in 59% of selected studies. 17% of the studies chosen favor hybrid models to overcome software development challenges. We qualitatively analyzed all the literature on software effort estimation using expert judgment, formal estimation techniques, ML-based techniques, and hybrid techniques. We discovered that researchers have frequently used ML-based models to estimate software effort and are currently in the lead. This study also explores the application of feature importance and selection in machine learning models for Software Effort Estimation (SEE) using popular algorithms like support Vector Machine (SVM), AdaBoost (AB), Gradient Boost (GB), and Random Forest (RF) with six benchmark datasets like CHINA, COCOMO-NASA2, COCOMO, COCOMO81, DESHARNAIS, and KITCHENHAM. We analyze the dataset descriptions and feature importance of the dataset analysis using ML models for choosing crucial play attributes in SEE.

Over the past ten couple of years, there is a variety of effort models proposed by academicians and practitioners at early stage of software development life cycle. Some addressed that efforts could be predicted using Lines of Codes(LOC) and COCOMO, others emphasized that it could be made using Function Point Analysis(FPA) or others. The study seeks to develop a model that estimates software effort by studying and analyzing small and medium scale application software. To develop such a model, 50 completed software projects are collected from a software company. With the sample data, design team factors are identified and extracted. By applying them to simple regression analyses, a prediction of software of effort estimates with accuracy of MMRE = 9% was constructed. The results give several benefits. First, the estimation problems are minimized due to the simple procedure used in identifying those factors. Second, the predicted software projects are only limited to a specific environment rather than being based upon industry environment. We believe the accuracy of effort estimates can be improved. According to the results analyzed, the work shows that it is possible to build up simple and useful prediction model based on data extracted at the early stage of software development life cycle. We hope this model can provide valuable ideas and suggestions for project designers for planning and controlling software projects in near future.

The accurate estimation of software development effort has major implications for the management of software development in the industry. Underestimates lead to time pressures that may compromise full functional development and thorough testing of the software product. On the other hand, overestimates can result in over allocation of development resources and personnel [1]. Many models for effort estimation have been developed during the past years; some of them use parametric methods with some degree of success, other kind of methods belonging to the machine learning techniques, such as Neural Networks (NN), have been also studied in this field showing more accurate estimations, and finally the Genetic programming (GP) techniques are being considered as promising tools for the prediction of effort estimation. In this work we are to compare the behaviour of GP and Genetic Algorithms (GA) to the Neural Network approach (backpropagation).

Crowd-Sourced software development (CSSD) is getting a good deal of attention from the software and research community in recent times. One of the key challenges faced by CSSD platforms is the task selection mechanism which in practice, contains no intelligent scheme. Rather, rule-of-thumb or intuition strategies are employed, leading to biasness and subjectivity. Effort considerations on crowdsourced tasks can offer good foundation for task selection criteria but are not much investigated. Software development effort estimation (SDEE) is quite prevalent domain in software engineering but only investigated for in-house development. For open-sourced or crowdsourced platforms, it is rarely explored. Moreover, Machine learning (ML) techniques are overpowering SDEE with a claim to provide more accurate estimation results. This work aims to conjoin ML-based SDEE to analyze development effort measures on CSSD platform. The purpose is to discover development-oriented features for crowdsourced tasks and analyze performance of ML techniques to find best estimation model on CSSD dataset. TopCoder is selected as target CSSD platform for the study. TopCoder’s development tasks data with development-centric features are extracted, leading to statistical, regression and correlation analysis to justify features’ significance. For effort estimation, 10 ML families with 2 respective techniques are applied to get broader aspect of estimation. Five performance metrices (MSE, RMSE, MMRE, MdMRE, Pred (25) and Welch’s statistical test are incorporated to judge the worth of effort estimation model’s performance. Data analysis results show that selected features of TopCoder pertain reasonable model significance, regression, and correlation measures. Findings of ML effort estimation depicted that best results for TopCoder dataset can be acquired by linear, non-linear regression and SVM family models. To conclude, the study identified the most relevant development features for CSSD platform, confirmed by in-depth data analysis. This reflects careful selection of effort estimation features to offer good basis of accurate ML estimate.

Comparative analysis of MCDM for energy efficiency projects evaluation towards sustainable industrial energy management: Case study of a petrochemical complex

Software cost and effort estimation using dragonfly whale optimized multilayer perceptron neural network

Hazard identification and prioritisation practices are very important for power plants to continue their operations without disruption. Systematic operational hazard analysis is not a very common practice at the Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) based power plants in Bangladesh. Hence, a structured hazard evaluation framework can greatly benefit them to ensure their operational safety. This study has been conducted to identify and prioritise the operational hazards of the HFO-based power plants through using a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach in a fuzzy environment, and then, to explore the appropriate mitigation methods for the top-ranked hazards and to find the interrelationships that exist among the mitigation methods. First, the most common hazards in HFO-based power plants have been identified from the expert feedbacks. Then, a fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) method has been used to determine the weights of the evaluation criteria and a fuzzy technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) method, has been used for the final ranking of the potential hazards. Afterwards, mitigation methods for the top 25 hazards have been identified and interrelationship among those mitigation methods has been explored through using interpretive structural modelling (ISM) and a matriced impacts croisés multiplication appliquée à un classement (MICMAC) analysis. The study finds that ‘explosion of high-pressure steam drum of the gas boiler’, ‘crankcase explosion and fire hazard due to oil pressure rise’ and ‘explosion of the compressed air reservoir’ are the top three hazards in the hazard ranking. ‘Standard operating procedure (SOP) and training’ have been found to be the most driving mitigation methods for the top-ranked hazards based on the ISM-MICMAC analysis. The findings of this study are expected to provide the managers of power plants with valuable insights, which can help them to prepare sustainable operational strategies to ensure the least hazardous work environment.