Estimation of desired effort is one of the most important activities in software project management. This work presents an approach for estimation based upon various feature selection and machine learning techniques for non-quantitative data and is carried out in two phases. The first phase concentrates on selection of optimal feature set of high dimensional data, related to projects undertaken in past. A quantitative analysis using Rough Set Theory and Information Gain is performed for feature selection. The second phase estimates the effort based on the optimal feature set obtained from first phase. The estimation is carried out differently by applying various Artificial Neural Networks and Classification techniques separately. The feature selection process in the first phase considers public domain data (USP05). The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated based on the parameters such as Mean Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Confusion Matrix. Machine learning methods, such as Feed Forward neural network, Radial Basis Function network, Functional Link neural network, Levenberg Marquadt neural network, Naive Bayes Classifier, Classification and Regression Tree and Support Vector classification, in combination of various feature selection techniques are compared with each other in order to find an optimal pair. It is observed that Functional Link neural network achieves better results among other neural networks and Naive Bayes classifier performs better for estimation when compared with other classification techniques.
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