Optainet-based technique for SVR feature selection and parameters optimization for software cost prediction

Abstract

The software cost prediction is a crucial element for a project’s success because it helps the project managers to efficiently estimate the needed effort for any project. There exist in literature many machine learning methods like decision trees, artificial neural networks (ANN), and support vector regressors (SVR), etc. However, many studies confirm that accurate estimations greatly depend on hyperparameters optimization, and on the proper input feature selection that impacts highly the accuracy of software cost prediction models (SCPM). In this paper, we propose an enhanced model using SVR and the Optainet algorithm. The Optainet is used at the same time for 1-selecting the best set of features and 2-for tuning the parameters of the SVR model. The experimental evaluation was conducted using a 30% holdout over seven datasets. The performance of the suggested model is then compared to the tuned SVR model using Optainet without feature selection. The results were also compared to the Boruta and random forest features selection methods. The experiments show that for overall datasets, the Optainet-based method improves significantly the accuracy of the SVR model and it outperforms the random forest and Boruta feature selection methods.