Software cost estimation using fuzzy decision trees

2009

This work addresses the issue of software effort prediction via fuzzy decision trees generated using historical project data samples. Moreover, the effect that various numerical and nominal project characteristics used as predictors have on software development effort is investigated utilizing the classification rules extracted. The approach attempts to classify successfully past project data into homogeneous clusters to provide accurate and reliable cost estimates within each cluster. CHAID and CART algorithms are applied on approximately 1000 project cost data records which were analyzed, preprocessed and used for generating fuzzy decision tree instances, followed by an evaluation method assessing prediction accuracy achieved by the classification rules produced. Even though the experimentation follows a heuristic approach, the trees built were found to fit the data properly, while the predicted effort values approximate well the actual effort.

2011

Web Effort Estimation is a process of predicting the efforts and cost in terms of money, schedule and staff for any software project system. Many estimation models have been proposed over the last three decades and it is believed that it is a must for the purpose of: Budgeting, risk analysis, project planning and control, and project improvement investment analysis. In this paper, we investigate the use of Fuzzy ID3 decision tree for software cost estimation; it is designed by integrating the principles of ID3 decision tree and the fuzzy set-theoretic concepts, enabling the model to handle uncertain and imprecise data when describing the software projects, which can improve greatly the accuracy of obtained estimates. MMRE and Pred are used as measures of prediction accuracy for this study. A series of experiments is reported using two different software projects datasets namely, Tukutuku and COCOMO’81 datasets. The results are compared with those produced by the crisp version of the...

International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 2011

Web Effort Estimation is a process of predicting the efforts and cost in terms of money, schedule and staff for any software project system. Many estimation models have been proposed over the last three decades and it is believed that it is a must for the purpose of: Budgeting, risk analysis, project planning and control, and project improvement investment analysis. In this paper, we investigate the use of Fuzzy ID3 decision tree for software cost estimation, it is designed by integrating the principles of ID3 decision tree and the fuzzy settheoretic concepts, enabling the model to handle uncertain and imprecise data when describing the software projects, which can improve greatly the accuracy of obtained estimates. MMRE and Pred are used, as measures of prediction accuracy, for this study. A series of experiments is reported using Tukutuku software projects dataset. The results are compared with those produced by three crisp versions of decision trees: ID3, C4.5 and CART.

International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications

The role of decision trees in software development effort estimation (SDEE) has received increased attention across several disciplines in recent years thanks to their power of predicting, their ease of use, and understanding. Furthermore, there are a large number of published studies that investigated the use of a decision tree (DT) techniques in SDEE. Nevertheless, in reviewing the literature, a systematic literature review (SLR) that assesses the evidence stated on DT techniques is still lacking. The main issues addressed in this paper have been divided into five parts: prediction accuracy, performance comparison, suitable conditions of prediction, the effect of the methods employed in association with DT techniques, and DT tools. To carry out this SLR, we performed an automatic search over five digital libraries for studies published between 1985 and 2019. In general, the results of this SLR revealed that most DT methods outperform many techniques and show an improvement in accuracy when combined with association rules (AR), fuzzy logic (FL), and bagging. Additionally, it has been observed a limited use of DT tools: it is therefore suggested for researchers to develop more DT tools to promote the industrial utilization of DT amongst professionals.

2015

Software cost estimation is the process of predicting the effort required to develop a software system. Many estimation models have been proposed over the last 30 years. With the development of software engineering, estimation of project cost and duration has been a very important work. It plays an important role in project bid and project planning. Many papers have been published regarding this topic, which aims at predicting costs of projects to a tolerable degree of accuracy at the early stage. In this paper, several existing fuzzy logic methods for software cost estimation are illustrated and they are compared with the intermediate COCOMO model. Comparing the features of the methods, it could be applied for clustering based on abilities and is also useful for selecting the special method for each project.

One of the major challenges for software, nowadays, is software cost estimation. It refers to estimating the cost of all activities including software development, design, supervision, maintenance and so on. Accurate cost-estimation of software projects optimizes the internal and external processes, staff works, efforts and the overheads to be coordinated with one another. In the management software projects, estimation must be taken into account so that reduces costs, timing and possible risks to avoid project failure. In this paper, a decision- support system using a combination of multi-layer artificial neural network and decision tree is proposed to estimate the cost of software projects. In the model included into the proposed system, normalizing factors, which is vital in evaluating efforts and costs estimation, is carried out using C4.5 decision tree. Moreover, testing and training factors are done by multi-layer artificial neural network and the most optimal values are alloc...

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence & Applications, 2012

Many cost estimation models have been proposed over the last three decades. In this study, we investigate fuzzy ID3 decision tree as a method for software effort estimation. Fuzzy ID software effort estimation model is designed by incorporating the principles of ID3 decision tree and the concepts of the fuzzy settheoretic; permitting the model to handle uncertain and imprecise data when presenting the software projects. MMRE (Mean Magnitude of Relative Error) and Pred(l) (Prediction at level l) are used, as measures of prediction accuracy, for this study. A series of experiments is reported using ISBSG software projects dataset. Fuzzy trees are grown using different fuzziness control thresholds. Results showed that optimizing the fuzzy ID3 parameters can improve greatly the accuracy of the generated software cost estimate.

Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

The current paper proposes a novel type of decision tree, which is never used for software development cost prediction (SDCP) purposes, the cluster-based fuzzy regression tree (CFRT). This model uses the fuzzy k-means (FKM), which deals with data uncertainty and imprecision. The tree expansion is based on the variability measure by choosing the node with the highest value of granulation diversity. This paper outlined an experimental study comparing CFRT with four SDCP methods, notably linear regression, multi-layer perceptron, K-nearest-neighbors, and classification and regression trees (CART), employing eight datasets and the leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV). The results show that CFRT is among the best, ranked first in 3 datasets according to four accuracy measures. Also, according to the Pred(25%) values, the proposed CFRT model outperformed all the twelve compared techniques in four datasets: Albrecht, constructive cost model (COCOMO), Desharnais, and The International Sof...

2013 Third International Conference on Communications and Information Technology (ICCIT), 2013

Accurate software effort estimation has been a challenge for many software practitioners and project managers. Underestimation leads to disruption in the project's estimated cost and delivery. On the other hand, overestimation causes outbidding and financial losses in business. Many software estimation models exist; however, none have been proven to be the best in all situations. In this paper, a decision tree forest (DTF) model is compared to a traditional decision tree (DT) model, as well as a multiple linear regression model (MLR). The evaluation was conducted using ISBSG and Desharnais industrial datasets. Results show that the DTF model is competitive and can be used as an alternative in software effort prediction.

2020

Software cost prediction is the technique of accurately evaluating the amount while developing the software. Estimation involves the total time required for the completion of the software, effort required that is measured in terms of person per month (PM), and the total cost to complete the activity. Accuracy and duration are the two desirable criteria in the software estimation process. In software estimation process, there are several inputs that are being fed to the system and these inputs are used for the generation or calculation of the set of outputs. The important work of the software project managers in the present scenario is the computation of cost or effort before the absolute advancement of any particular software. There are several methods applied for software cost estimation but we will focus on the fuzzy logic which is a soft-computing method. We feel that model which is based on fuzzy logic for the software cost estimation should be able to give the uncertain values ...