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On Building Prediction Systems for Software Engineers

Published: 01 November 2000 Publication History

Abstract

Building and evaluating prediction systems is an important activity for software engineering researchers. Increasing numbers of techniques and datasets are now being made available. Unfortunately systematic comparison is hindered by the use of different accuracy indicators and evaluation processes. We argue that these indicators are statistics that describe properties of the estimation errors or residuals and that the sensible choice of indicator is largely governed by the goals of the estimator. For this reason it may be helpful for researchers to provide a range of indicators. We also argue that it is useful to formally test for significant differences between competing prediction systems and note that where only a few cases are available this can be problematic, in other words the research instrument may have insufficient power. We demonstrate that this is the case for a well known empirical study of cost models. Simulation, however, could be one means of overcoming this difficulty.

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Published In

cover image Empirical Software Engineering
Empirical Software Engineering  Volume 5, Issue 3
November 2000
126 pages

Publisher

Kluwer Academic Publishers

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 2000

Author Tags

  1. Cost estimation
  2. empirical evaluation
  3. prediction system

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  • (2021)An analysis of Monte Carlo simulations for forecasting software projectsProceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3412841.3442030(1550-1558)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2021
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