Abstract: With the continual promotion of the performances of military aircrafts, various cost drive factors make the former acquisition cost estimating model not be applicable for modern military aircrafts. Analyzing small samples and various cost drive factors of military aircrafts’ acquisition cost and considering the advantages of Partial Least-Squares Regression (PLSR) in analyzing multivariate data with small samples, an application of PLSR to military aircraft’s acquisition cost estimating is proposed. Firstly, PLSR extracts the first and second principal components of military aircrafts’ acquisition cost data to identify the outliers in samples; secondly, PLSR selects cost drive factors with Variable Importance in Projection from the valid samples; finally, PLSR regresses to cost drive factors and establishes the military aircraft’s acquisition cost estimating model. The calculated results in the example show that, compared with the former estimating model and stepwise regression model, PLSR model has higher accuracy in military aircraft’s acquisition cost estimating, and can reflect better the correlation between acquisition cost and performance parameters of military aircrafts.

Key words: military aircraft, acquisition cost, Partial Least-Squares Regression(PLSR), cost drive factor