Whale–crow optimization (WCO)-based Optimal Regression model for Software Cost Estimation

Abstract

Software Cost Estimation (SCE) is the emerging concern of the software companies during the development phase of the software, as it requires effort and cost factors for modelling the software. These factors are modelled using the Artificial Intelligence models, which seem to be less accurate and non-reliable by increasing the risk factor of the software projects. Thus, for estimating the software cost, meta-heuristics are employed. This paper proposes an algorithm, termed as whale–crow optimization (WCO) algorithm, which is the integration of the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) and the crow search algorithm (CSA). The main function of the WCO algorithm is to determine the Optimal Regression coefficients for the regression models, such as the Linear Regression model and the Kernel Logistic Regression model, to develop an Optimal Regression model to estimate the software cost. The experimentation is carried out using four datasets taken from the Promise software engineering repository to perform effective performance analysis. Analysis is carried out regarding the mean magnitude of relative error (MMRE) that proves that the proposed method of SCE is effective, attaining the average MMRE at a rate of 0.2442 for the proposed Linear Regression model and 0.2692 for the proposed Kernel Regression model.