  The job of software effort estimation is a critical one in the early stages
of the software development life cycle when the details of requirements are
usually not clearly identified. Various optimization techniques help in
improving the accuracy of effort estimation. The Support Vector Regression
(SVR) is one of several different soft-computing techniques that help in
getting optimal estimated values. The idea of SVR is based upon the computation
of a linear regression function in a high dimensional feature space where the
input data are mapped via a nonlinear function. Further, the SVR kernel methods
can be applied in transforming the input data and then based on these
transformations, an optimal boundary between the possible outputs can be
obtained. The main objective of the research work carried out in this paper is
to estimate the software effort using use case point approach. The use case
point approach relies on the use case diagram to estimate the size and effort
of software projects. Then, an attempt has been made to optimize the results
obtained from use case point analysis using various SVR kernel methods to
achieve better prediction accuracy.

Software Engineering;Machine Learning