Software Project Risk Management Modeling with Neural Network and Support Vector Machine Approaches

Software project development has high failure rate. Software project risk management may gain a high rate of return in investment. Establishing an intelligent risk evaluation model for project will be valuable in the analysis and control of project risks. In this paper, we employed neural network (NN) and support vector machine (SVM) approaches to establish a model for risk evaluation in project development. In the model, the input is a vector of software risk factors that were obtained through interview with 30 experts, and the output is the final outcome of the project. The data for modeling were collected from 120 real software projects through questionnaires. The experiment shows the model is valid. Interestingly, SVM is a powerful supervised learning method, and some believe that it is a more promising classification method that may someday supercede NN. In our study, the standard neural network model had lower prediction accuracy compared to SVM due to its tendency in finding local optima. However, after attempt in optimizing the neural network model with genetic algorithm, the experimental results showed that our enhanced model surpassed SVM in performance.