A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ABSENT FEATURES AND UNOBSERVED VALUES IN SOFTWARE EFFORT DATA

Abstract

Software effort data contains a large amount of missing values of project attributes. The problem of absent features, which occurred recently in machine learning, is often neglected by researchers of software engineering when handling the missingness in software effort data. In essence, absent features (structural missingness) and unobserved values (unstructured missingness) are different cases of missingness although their appearance in the data set are the same. This paper attempts to clarify the root cause of missingness of software effort data. When regarding missingness as absent features, we develop Max-margin regression to predict real effort of software projects. When regarding missingness as unobserved values, we use existing imputation techniques to impute missing values. Then, ε – SVR is used to predict real effort of software projects with the input data sets. Experiments on ISBSG (International Software Benchmarking Standard Group) and CSBSG (Chinese Software Benchmarking Standard Group) data sets demonstrate that, with the tasks of effort prediction, the treatment regarding missingness in software effort data set as unobserved values can produce more desirable performance than that of regarding missingness as absent features. This paper is the first to introduce the concept of absent features to deal with missingness of software effort data.