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.
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.
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