Machine Learning-Based Method for Predicting Compressive Strength of Concrete

Accurate prediction of the compressive strength of concrete is of great significance to construction quality and progress. In order to understand the current research status in the concrete compressive strength prediction field, a bibliometric analysis of the relevant literature published in this field in the last decade was conducted first. The 3135 journal articles published from 2012 to 2021 in the Web of Science core database were used as the database, and the knowledge map was drawn with the help of the visualisation software CiteSpace 6.1R2 to analyse the field at the macro level in terms of spatial and temporal distribution, hotspot distribution and evolutionary trends, respectively. Afterwards, we go into the detail and divide concrete compressive strength prediction methods into two categories: traditional and machine-learning methods, and introduce the typical methods of each. In addition, a boosting-based ensemble machine-learning algorithm, namely the gradient boosting regression tree (GBRT) algorithm, is proposed for predicting the compressive strength of concrete. 1030 sets of concrete compressive strength test data were collected as the dataset, of which 60% were used to train the model, 20% to validate the model and 20% to test the trained model. The coefficient of determination (R-2) of the GBRT model was 0.92, the mean square error (MSE) was 22.09 MPa, and the root mean square error (RMSE) was 4.7 MPa, which is an excellent prediction accuracy compared to prediction models constructed by other machine-learning algorithms. In addition, a five-fold cross-validation analysis was carried out, and the eight input variables were analyzed for their characteristic importance.