AREION: Software effort estimation based on multiple regressions with adaptive recursive data partitioning

Abstract

Context: Along with expert judgment, analogy-based estimation, and algorithmic methods (such as Function point analysis and COCOMO), Least Squares Regression (LSR) has been one of the most commonly studied software effort estimation methods. However, an effort estimation model using LSR, a single LSR model, is highly affected by the data distribution. Specifically, if the data set is scattered and the data do not sit closely on the single LSR model line (do not closely map to a linear structure) then the model usually shows poor performance. In order to overcome this drawback of the LSR model, a data partitioning-based approach can be considered as one of the solutions to alleviate the effect of data distribution. Even though clustering-based approaches have been introduced, they still have potential problems to provide accurate and stable effort estimates. Objective: In this paper, we propose a new data partitioning-based approach to achieve more accurate and stable effort estimates via LSR. This approach also provides an effort prediction interval that is useful to describe the uncertainty of the estimates. Method: Empirical experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach by comparing with the basic LSR approach and clustering-based approaches, based on industrial data sets (two subsets of the ISBSG (Release 9) data set and one industrial data set collected from a banking institution). Results: The experimental results show that the proposed approach not only improves the accuracy of effort estimation more significantly than that of other approaches, but it also achieves robust and stable results according to the degree of data partitioning. Conclusion: Compared with the other considered approaches, the proposed approach shows a superior performance by alleviating the effect of data distribution that is a major practical issue in software effort estimation. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.