Performance tuning for machine learning-based software development effort prediction models

Egement Ertugrul, Zakir Baytar, C. Catal*, Can Muratli

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

16 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Software development effort estimation is a critical activity of the project management process. In this study, machine learning algorithms were investigated in conjunction with feature transformation, feature selection, and
parameter tuning techniques to estimate the development effort accurately and a new model was proposed as part of an expert system. We preferred the most general-purpose algorithms, applied parameter optimization technique (Grid-
Search), feature transformation techniques (binning and one-hot-encoding), and feature selection algorithm (principal component analysis). All the models were trained on the ISBSG datasets and implemented by using the scikit-learn
package in the Python language. The proposed model uses a multilayer perceptron as its underlying algorithm, applies binning of the features to transform continuous features and one-hot-encoding technique to transform categorical data into numerical values as feature transformation techniques, does feature selection based on the principal component analysis method, and performs parameter tuning based on the GridSearch algorithm. We demonstrate that our effort prediction model mostly outperforms the other existing models in terms of prediction accuracy based on the mean absolute residual parameter.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1308-1324
JournalTurkish Journal of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences
Volume27
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 22 Mar 2019

Keywords

  • Artificial neural networks
  • Feature binning
  • Grid search
  • Machine learning
  • Mean absolute residual
  • Software effort estimation

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Performance tuning for machine learning-based software development effort prediction models'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this