Natural Evolutionary Coding: An Application to Estimating Software Development Projects.
Jesús S. Aguilar–Ruiz, José C. Riquelme, Isabel M. Ramos · Deposito de Investigacion Universidad de Sevilla (University of Seville) · 2002
Software Project Simulator and Evolutionary Computation are combined to generate decision rules. The purpose is to provide accurate decision rules in order to help the project manager to take decisions at any time in the development. To obtain these rules we have analysed a new method to encode the individuals (rules) of the genetic population. Our approach, named" natural coding", uses one gene per continuous attribute leading to a reduction in the search space, what might have influence on the convergence of the evolutionary algorithm. Genetic operators for this approached natural coding are described. The application of our method to databases obtained by means of simulations are summarized in the last section, in which the decision rules are compared to that of C4. 5. Results show that the evolutionary approach produces better decision rules for this decision-making task.