Predicting Frost Depth of Soils in South Korea Using Machine Learning Techniques

Predicting the frost depth of soils in pavement design is critical to the sustainability of the pavement because of its mechanical vulnerability to frozen-thawed soil. The reliable prediction of frost depth can be challenging due to the high uncertainty of frost depth and the unavailability of geotechnical properties needed to use the available empirical- and analytical-based equations in literature. Therefore, this study proposed a new framework to predict the frost depth of soil below the pavement using eight machine learning (ML) algorithms (five single ML algorithms and three ensemble learning algorithms) without geotechnical properties. Among eight ML models, the hyperparameter-tuned gradient boosting model showed the best performance with the coefficient of determination (R-2) = 0.919. Furthermore, it was also shown that the developed ML model can be utilized in the prediction of several levels of frost depth and assessing the sensitivity of pavement-related predictors for predicting the frost depth of soils.