An Ensemble of Hybrid Search-Based Algorithms for Software Effort Prediction

Software organizations rely on the estimation of efforts required for the development of software to negotiate customers and plan the schedule of the project. Proper estimation of efforts reduces the chances of project failures. Historical data of projects have been used to predict the effort required for software development. In recent years, various ensemble of machine learning techniques have been used to predict software effort. In the present work, a novel ensemble technique of hybrid search-based algorithms (EHSBA) is used for software effort estimation. Four HSBAs—fuzzy and random sets-based modeling (FRSBM-R), symbolic fuzzy learning based on genetic programming (GFS-GP-R), symbolic fuzzy learning based on genetic programming grammar operators and simulated annealing (GFS_GSP_R), and least mean squares linear regression (LinearLMS_R)—are used to create an ensemble (EHSBA). The EHSBA is compared with machine learning-based ensemble bagging, vote, and stacking on datasets obtained from PROMISE repository. Obtained results reported that EHSBA outperformed all other techniques.