Predicting Compressive Strength of Concrete Containing Industrial Waste Materials: Novel and Hybrid Machine Learning Model

Abstract

In the construction and cement manufacturing sectors, the development of artificial intelligence models has received remarkable progress and attention. This paper investigates the capacity of hybrid models conducted for predicting the compressive strength (CS) of concrete where the cement was partially replaced with ground granulated blast-furnace slag ( $\text{FS}$ ) and fly ash ( $\text{FA}$ ) materials. Accurate estimation of CS can reduce the cost and laboratory tests. Since the traditional method of calculation CS is complicated and requires lots of effort, this article presents new predictive models called $\text{SVR}-\text{PSO}$ and $\text{SVR}-\text{GA}$ , that are a hybridization of support vector regression ( $\text{SVR}$ ) with improved particle swarm algorithm ( $\text{PSO}$ ) and genetic algorithm ( $\text{GA}$ ). Furthermore, the hybrid models (i.e., $\text{SVR}-\text{PSO}$ and $\text{SVR}-\text{GA}$ ) were used for the first time to predict CS of concrete where the cement component is partially replaced. The improved $\text{PSO}$ and $\text{GA}$ are given essential roles in tuning the hyperparameters of the SVR model, which have a significant influence on model accuracy. The suggested models are evaluated against extreme learning machine (ELM) via quantitative and visual evaluations. The models are evaluated using eight statistical parameters, and then the SVR-PSO has provided the highest accuracy than comparative models. For instance, the $\text{SVR}-\text{PSO}$ during the testing phase provided fewer root mean square error $\left(\text{RMSE}\right)$ with 1.386 MPa, a higher Nash–Sutcliffe model efficiency coefficient ( $\text{NE}$ ) of 0.972, and lower uncertainty at 95% ( ${\text{U}}_{95}$ ) with 28.776%. On the other hand, the $\text{SVR}-\text{GA}$ and $\text{ELM}$ models provide lower accuracy with $\text{RMSE}$ of 2.826 MPa and 2.180, $\text{NE}$ with 0.883 and 0.930, and ${\text{U}}_{95}$ with 518.686 183.182, respectively. Sensitivity analysis is carried out to select the influential parameters that significantly affect $\text{CS}$ . Overall, the proposed model showed a good prediction of CS of concrete where cement is partially replaced and outperformed 14 models developed in the previous studies.