Results of Application of Artificial Neural Networks in Predicting Geo-Mechanical Properties of Stabilised Clays—A Review

Abstract

This study presents a literature review on the use of artificial neural networks in the prediction of geo-mechanical properties of stabilised clays. In this paper, the application of ANNs in a geotechnical analysis of clay stabilised with cement, lime, geopolymers and by-product cementitious materials has been evaluated. The chemical treatment of expansive clays will involve the development of optimum binder mix proportions or the improvement of a specific soil property using additives. These procedures often generate large data requiring regression analysis in order to correlate experimental data and model the performance of the soil in the field. These analyses involve large datasets and tedious mathematical procedures to correlate the variables and develop required models using traditional regression analysis. The findings from this study show that ANNs are becoming well known in dealing with the problem of mathematical modelling involving nonlinear functions due to their robust data analysis and correlation capabilities and have been successfully applied to the stabilisation of clays with high performance. The study also shows that the supervised ANN model is well adapted to dealing with stabilisation of clays with high performance as indicated by high R2 and low MAE, RMSE and MSE values. The Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm is effective in shortening the convergence time during model training.