Regression and decision tree approaches in predicting the effort in resolving incidents

IT service management plays a key role in software maintenance. Service management offers the customers a platform to raise the incidents that needs to be resolved. This papers is a comprehensive analysis performed on research in the area of production support. Lacunas are identified in different areas of production support services. The necessity of a generalised proactive model that can predict the effort required in closing incident tickets are identified. The paper further presents the scope of integrating machine learning approaches to predict effort in an incident management system of production support. Two different approaches are considered in modelling namely, regression-based and tree-based modelling. In tree-based modelling, basic decision tree and random forest models are used along with multiple linear regression model. In order to build the model, real-time dataset is used. The models are verified using a real-time test dataset. The models being dataset dependent did not generalise and converge well due to which, the possibility of developing other models using different machine learning techniques are discussed.