Data mining model for predicting the quality level and classification of construction projects

Abstract

Project managers supervise projects to ensure their smooth completion within a stipulated time frame and budget while guaranteeing construction quality. The relationships of various attributes with quality can be quantified and classified to facilitate such supervision. Therefore, this study used a data mining algorithm to analyze the relationships between defects, quality levels, contract sums, project categories, and progress in 1,015 inspection projects. In the first part, association rule mining (ARM), an unsupervised data mining approach, was used to obtain 11 rules relating two defect types (i.e., quality management system and construction quality) and determine the relationships between the four attributes (i.e., quality level, contract sum, project category, and progress). The resulting association rule may be beneficial for construction management because project managers can use it to determine the correlations between defects and attributes. In the second part, supervised data mining techniques, namely neural network (NN), support vector machine (SVM), and decision tree (C5.0 and QUEST) algorithms, were applied to develop a classification model for quality prediction. The target variable was quality, which was divided into four levels, and the decision variables comprised 499 defects, 3 contract sums, 7 project categories, and 2 progress variables. The results indicated that five defects were important. Finally, the four indicators of gain chart, break-even point (BEP), accuracy, and area under the curve (AUC) were calculated to evaluate the model. For the SVM model, the actual value predicted by the gain chart was 96.04%, the BEP was 0.95, and the AUC was 0.935. The SVM yielded optimal classification efficiency and effectively predicted the quality level. The data mining model developed in this study can serve as a reference for effective construction management.