A Fuzzy Decision Tree to Estimate Development Effort for Web Applications

Abstract

Web Effort Estimation is a process of predicting the efforts and cost in terms of money, schedule and staff for any software project system. Many estimation models have been proposed over the last three decades and it is believed that it is a must for the purpose of: Budgeting, risk analysis, project planning and control, and project improvement investment analysis. In this paper, we investigate the use of Fuzzy ID3 decision tree for software cost estimation, it is designed by integrating the principles of ID3 decision tree and the fuzzy set-theoretic concepts, enabling the model to handle uncertain and imprecise data when describing the software projects, which can improve greatly the accuracy of obtained estimates. MMRE and Pred are used, as measures of prediction accuracy, for this study. A series of experiments is reported using Tukutuku software projects dataset. The results are compared with those produced by three crisp versions of decision trees: ID3, C4.5 and CART.