Case-Selective Neural Network Model and Its Application to Software Effort Estimation

It is very difficult to maintain the performance of estimation models for the new breed of projects since the computing environment changes so rapidly in terms of programming languages, development tools, and methodologies. So, we propose to use the relevant cases for a neural network model, whose cost is the decreased number of cases. To balance the relevance and data availability, the qualitative input factors are used as criteria of data classification. With the data sets that have the same value for certain qualitative input factors, we can eliminate the factors from the model making reduced neural network models. So we need to seek the optimally reduced neural network model among them. To find the optimally case-selective neural network, we propose the search techniques and sensitivity analysis between data points and search space.