A comparative study of prediction of compressive strength of ultra-high performance concrete using soft computing technique

Abstract

Concrete which is the most commercialized construction material and thus it plays a key role in this era of development and hence its evolution is of utmost importance and therefore the evolution of the quality of concrete to that of its highly evolved type namely, ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) is undeniably the boon to this sector. Though, the correlations between the technical characteristics of UHPC and the composition of its mixture are complicated, nonlinear, and complex to characterize using standard statistical techniques. This paper is intended to use both deep neural network and ensemble machine learning algorithms namely gradient boosting, extreme gradient boosting, random forest regressor, extra tree regressor, and voting regressor trained with an 810 UHPC mixture collections with 15 input variables to predict its compressive strength. After adjusting a regression model, the prediction efficiency and generalization ability of the developed models are validated using a number of performance parameters. It was established that all employed models performed better at forecasting result, the extra tree regressor was the most accurate followed by extreme gradient boosting.