Improved Analogy-based Effort Estimation with Incomplete Mixed Data

Hyperspectral unmixing is an important technique for analyzing remote sensing images which aims to obtain a collection of endmembers and their corresponding abundances. In recent years, non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has received extensive attention due to its good adaptability for mixed data with different degrees. The majority of existing NMF-based unmixing methods are developed by incorporating additional constraints into the standard NMF based on the spectral and spatial information of hyperspectral images. However, they neglect to exploit the nature of imbalanced pixels included in the data, which may cause the pixels mixed with imbalanced endmembers to be ignored, and thus the imbalanced endmembers generally cannot be accurately estimated due to the statistical property of NMF. To exploit the information of imbalanced samples in hyperspectral data during the unmixing procedure, in this paper, a cluster-wise weighted NMF (CW-NMF) method for the unmixing of hyperspectral images with imbalanced data is proposed. Specifically, based on the result of clustering conducted on the hyperspectral image, we construct a weight matrix and introduce it into the model of standard NMF. The proposed weight matrix can provide an appropriate weight value to the reconstruction error between each original pixel and the reconstructed pixel in the unmixing procedure. In this way, the adverse effect of imbalanced samples on the statistical accuracy of NMF is expected to be reduced by assigning larger weight values to the pixels concerning imbalanced endmembers and giving smaller weight values to the pixels mixed by majority endmembers. Besides, we extend the proposed CW-NMF by introducing the sparsity constraints of abundance and graph-based regularization, respectively. The experimental results on both synthetic and real hyperspectral data have been reported, and the effectiveness of our proposed methods has been demonstrated by comparing them with several state-of-the-art methods.

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Visualizing Profiles of Large Datasets of Weighted and Mixed Data

Mathematics ◽

10.3390/math9080891 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 9 (8) ◽

pp. 891

Author(s):

Aurea Grané ◽

Alpha A. Sow-Barry

Keyword(s):

Multidimensional Scaling ◽

Random Sample ◽

Simulation Study ◽

Clustering Algorithm ◽

Computational Cost ◽

Interpolation Formula ◽

Large Datasets ◽

Mixed Data ◽

Multivariate Techniques ◽

High Computational Cost

This work provides a procedure with which to construct and visualize profiles, i.e., groups of individuals with similar characteristics, for weighted and mixed data by combining two classical multivariate techniques, multidimensional scaling (MDS) and the k-prototypes clustering algorithm. The well-known drawback of classical MDS in large datasets is circumvented by selecting a small random sample of the dataset, whose individuals are clustered by means of an adapted version of the k-prototypes algorithm and mapped via classical MDS. Gower’s interpolation formula is used to project remaining individuals onto the previous configuration. In all the process, Gower’s distance is used to measure the proximity between individuals. The methodology is illustrated on a real dataset, obtained from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which was carried out in 19 countries and represents over 124 million aged individuals in Europe. The performance of the method was evaluated through a simulation study, whose results point out that the new proposal solves the high computational cost of the classical MDS with low error.

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Estimating Software Development Efforts Using a Random Forest-Based Stacked Ensemble Approach

Electronics ◽

10.3390/electronics10101195 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (10) ◽

pp. 1195

Author(s):

Priya Varshini A G ◽

Anitha Kumari K ◽

Vijayakumar Varadarajan

Keyword(s):

Deep Learning ◽

Random Forest ◽

Software Development ◽

Weighted Averaging ◽

Software Project ◽

Effort Estimation ◽

Software Effort Estimation ◽

Single Model ◽

Ensemble Techniques ◽

Project Estimation

Software Project Estimation is a challenging and important activity in developing software projects. Software Project Estimation includes Software Time Estimation, Software Resource Estimation, Software Cost Estimation, and Software Effort Estimation. Software Effort Estimation focuses on predicting the number of hours of work (effort in terms of person-hours or person-months) required to develop or maintain a software application. It is difficult to forecast effort during the initial stages of software development. Various machine learning and deep learning models have been developed to predict the effort estimation. In this paper, single model approaches and ensemble approaches were considered for estimation. Ensemble techniques are the combination of several single models. Ensemble techniques considered for estimation were averaging, weighted averaging, bagging, boosting, and stacking. Various stacking models considered and evaluated were stacking using a generalized linear model, stacking using decision tree, stacking using a support vector machine, and stacking using random forest. Datasets considered for estimation were Albrecht, China, Desharnais, Kemerer, Kitchenham, Maxwell, and Cocomo81. Evaluation measures used were mean absolute error, root mean squared error, and R-squared. The results proved that the proposed stacking using random forest provides the best results compared with single model approaches using the machine or deep learning algorithms and other ensemble techniques.

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