MINN: A Missing Data Imputation Technique for Analogy-based Effort Estimation

Success and failure of a complex software project are strongly associated with the accurate estimation of development effort. There are numerous estimation models developed but the most widely used among those is Analogy-Based Estimation (ABE). ABE model follows human nature as it estimates the future project’s effort by making analogies with the past project's data. Since ABE relies on the historical datasets, the quality of the datasets affects the accuracy of estimation. Most of the software engineering datasets have missing values. The researchers either delete the projects containing missing values or avoid treating the missing values which reduce the ABE performance. In this study, Numeric Cleansing (NC), K-Nearest Neighbor Imputation (KNNI) and Median Imputation of the Nearest Neighbor (MINN) methods are used to impute the missing values in Desharnais and DesMiss datasets for ABE. MINN technique is introduced in this study. A comparison among these imputation methods is performed to identify the suitable missing data imputation method for ABE. The results suggested that MINN imputes more realistic values in the missing datasets as compared to values imputed through NC and KNNI. It was also found that the imputation treatment method helped in better prediction of the software development effort on ABE model.