Affiliations: [a] Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Science, University of Johannesburg, P.O. Box 524, Auckland Park, Johannesburg 2006, South Africa | [b] Brunel Software Engineering Research Centre, School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Bhekisipho Twala, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Science, University of Johannesburg, P.O. Box 524, Auckland Park, Johannesburg 2006, South Africa. %CSIR, Modelling and Digital Sciences Unit, P.O. Box 395, Pretoria 0001, South Africa. Tel.: +27 11 559 4404; Fax: +27 11 559 2357; E-mail: btwala@uj.ac.za
Abstract: Constructing an accurate effort prediction model is a challenge in software engineering. The development and validation of models that are used for prediction tasks require good quality data. Unfortunately, software engineering datasets tend to suffer from the incompleteness which could result to inaccurate decision making and project management and implementation. Recently, the use of machine learning algorithms has proven to be of great practical value in solving a variety of software engineering problems including software prediction, including the use of ensemble (combining) classifiers. Research indicates that ensemble individual classifiers lead to a significant improvement in classification performance by having them vote for the most popular class. This paper proposes a method for improving software effort prediction accuracy produced by a decision tree learning algorithm and by generating the ensemble using two imputation methods as elements. Benchmarking results on ten industrial datasets show that the proposed ensemble strategy has the potential to improve prediction accuracy compared to an individual imputation method, especially if multiple imputation is a component of the ensemble.
