Type
Conference PaperAuthors
Minku, Leandro L.Hou, Siqing

KAUST Department
Computer Science ProgramComputer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division
Date
2017-10-06Online Publication Date
2017-10-06Print Publication Date
2017Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/626153
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Background: Software Effort Estimation (SEE) can be formulated as an online learning problem, where new projects are completed over time and may become available for training. In this scenario, a Cross-Company (CC) SEE approach called Dycom can drastically reduce the number of Within-Company (WC) projects needed for training, saving the high cost of collecting such training projects. However, Dycom relies on splitting CC projects into different subsets in order to create its CC models. Such splitting can have a significant impact on Dycom's predictive performance. Aims: This paper investigates whether clustering methods can be used to help finding good CC splits for Dycom. Method: Dycom is extended to use clustering methods for creating the CC subsets. Three different clustering methods are investigated, namely Hierarchical Clustering, K-Means, and Expectation-Maximisation. Clustering Dycom is compared against the original Dycom with CC subsets of different sizes, based on four SEE databases. A baseline WC model is also included in the analysis. Results: Clustering Dycom with K-Means can potentially help to split the CC projects, managing to achieve similar or better predictive performance than Dycom. However, K-Means still requires the number of CC subsets to be pre-defined, and a poor choice can negatively affect predictive performance. EM enables Dycom to automatically set the number of CC subsets while still maintaining or improving predictive performance with respect to the baseline WC model. Clustering Dycom with Hierarchical Clustering did not offer significant advantage in terms of predictive performance. Conclusion: Clustering methods can be an effective way to automatically generate Dycom's CC subsets.Citation
Minku LL, Hou S (2017) Clustering Dycom. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering - PROMISE. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3127005.3127007.Sponsors
Part of this work has been conducted during Siqing Hou’s internship at the University of Birmingham (UK)Additional Links
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3127005.3127007ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1145/3127005.3127007