Towards Sustainable Construction Materials: A Comparative Study of Prediction Models for Green Concrete with Metakaolin

Abstract

Cement-based materials are widely used in transportation, construction, national defense, and other fields, due to their excellent properties. High performance, low energy consumption, and environmental protection are essential directions for the sustainable development of cement-based materials. To alleviate the environmental pressure caused by carbon emissions in cement production, this paper studies cement-based materials containing metakaolin by a comparison of prediction models for the compressive strength. To more accurately evaluate the compressive strength of metakaolin cement-based materials, this paper compares the prediction effects of four models, namely, support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and random forest (RF), with hyperparameters optimized by the Firefly Algorithm (FA) to study the compressive strength of cement-based materials containing metakaolin. The results demonstrated that the RF model showed the optimized prediction effect considering the lowest RSME value and the highest R value among the hybrid models for predicting metakaolin cement-based materials’ compressive strength. The importance test showed that the cement grade and the water-to-binder ratio greatly influence the compressive strength of cement-based materials with metakaolin compared to the other design parameters.