Hybridizing Grid Search and Support Vector Regression to Predict the Compressive Strength of Fly Ash Concrete

Abstract

Support vector regression (SVR) has been applied to the prediction of mechanical properties of concrete, but the selection of its hyperparameters has been a key factor affecting the prediction accuracy. To this end, hybrid machine learning combines the SVR model and grid search (GS), namely, the GS-SVR model was proposed to predict the compressive strength of concrete and sensitivity analysis in this work. The hybrid model was trained and tested on a total of 98 datasets retrieved from literature, and the model performance was compared with the original SVR model under the same datasets. The obtained results in terms of R of 0.981, MSE of 3.44, RMSE of 1.85, MAE of 1.17, and MAPE of 0.05 demonstrate that the GS-SVR model proposed can be a candidate method for compressive strength prediction in subsequent related studies. Additionally, a graphical user interface (GUI) was developed to conveniently provide some initial estimates of the outcomes before performing extensive laboratory or fieldwork. Finally, the effect of each variable on the compressive strength in a random environment was analyzed.