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Comparison of weighted grey relational analysis for software effort estimation

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Abstract

In recent years, grey relational analysis (GRA), a similarity-based method, has been proposed and used in many applications. However, we found that most traditional GRA methods only consider nonweighted similarity for predicting software development effort. In fact, nonweighted similarity may cause biased predictions, because each feature of a project may have a different degree of relevance to the development effort. Therefore, this paper proposes six weighted methods, including nonweighted, distance-based, correlative, linear, nonlinear, and maximal weights, to be integrated into GRA for software effort estimation. Numerical examples and sensitivity analyses based on four public datasets are used to show the performance of the proposed methods. The experimental results indicate that the weighted GRA can improve estimation accuracy and reliability from the nonweighted GRA. The results also demonstrate that the weighted GRA performs better than other estimation techniques and published results. In summary, we can conclude that weighted GRA can be a viable and alternative method for predicting software development effort.

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Notes

  1. Software development effort can be further used to estimate software development cost. Therefore, the terms “software effort” and “software cost” are generally used in other studies in this field.

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Acknowledgments

The work described in this paper was supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under Grant NSC 97-2221-E-007-052-MY3 and NSC 98-2221-E-007-067, and also substantially supported by a grant from the Ministry of Economic Affairs of Taiwan (Project No. 98-EC-17-A-02-S2-0097).The authors would like to thank several anonymous reviewers for their critical reviews and in-depth comments that helped to improve this paper. Thanks are also given to Amber Tsai, Prof. Nan-Hsing Chiu, and Prof. Swe-Kai Chen of National Tsing Hua University for their comments to enhance the quality of the paper.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

    Chao-Jung Hsu & Chin-Yu Huang

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  1. Chao-Jung Hsu
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Hsu, CJ., Huang, CY. Comparison of weighted grey relational analysis for software effort estimation. Software Qual J 19, 165–200 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-010-9110-y

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