Jul 2026· Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers : Engineering Sustainability· pp. 1-23· 0 citations· 42 references
TL;DR
A thorough assessment of model efficiency and feature significance for improving concrete mixes is offered, emphasising the better predictive power of linear regression.
Abstract
This paper evaluates variations in supplementary cementitious materials, water-cement ratios, curing times, aggregate sizes, and cement content, the predictive efficacy of five machine learning models – linear regression, random forest, support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbours (KNN), and decision tree – on the compressive strength of concrete. With R2 values between 0.2767 and 0.7440, root mean squared error values ranging from 8.4935 to 17.0477, and mean absolute error values spanning 6.7134 to 14.1603, linear regression shown better accuracy. KNN did well with R2 values of 0.427 and 0.5209 in Cases 2 and 3, respectively, it performed badly in Case 4. under Case 2, the SVM obtained an excellent R2 of 0.4467. With a R2 of 0.8607, random forest performed best in Case 3, it failed in Case 4 nevertheless. Always underperforming, the decision tree showed negative R2 values and notable errors under all conditions. Hence improving model performance, the random forest and SVM obtained R2 values of 0.8607 and 0.8756, respectively. According to Shapley Additive explanations studies, ‘curing time days’ and ‘water-cement ratio’ greatly influence ‘compressive strength’. Emphasising the better predictive power of linear regression, the paper offers a thorough assessment of model efficiency and feature significance for improving concrete mixes.
The use of supplementary cementitious materials such as fly ash can reduce environmental impacts and improve the sustainability of concrete construction. However, the nonlinear interactions among mixture design parameters make accurate prediction of concrete compressive strength challenging. In this study, TabPFN, a pre-trained foundation model for tabular data, was applied to predict the compressive strength of fly ash concrete and compared with tuned Random Forest, support vector regression, an artificial neural network, LightGBM, CatBoost, Ridge regression, and Abrams empirical regression. A dataset containing 1062 samples and eight mixture-level variables was used for model development and evaluation. Predictive performance was assessed using the coefficient of determination, mean absolute error, and root mean square error over 100 repeated random splits. The results showed that TabPFN achieved the best overall performance, with an average coefficient of determination of 0.9329, a mean absolute error of 3.2758 MPa, and a root mean square error of 4.6678 MPa. Compared with the strongest tuned gradient-boosting baseline, CatBoost, TabPFN reduced the mean absolute error and root mean square error by 0.8768 MPa and 0.8560 MPa, respectively. Furthermore, repeated-split conformal prediction demonstrated reliable uncertainty quantification, with an average prediction interval coverage probability of 0.9615 and a mean prediction interval width of 23.4554 MPa. SHAP analysis identified the water-to-cement ratio, mortar strength, and water-to-binder ratio as important variables, while additional multicollinearity and feature ablation analyses indicated that correlated ratio variables should be interpreted cautiously. The results indicate that TabPFN provides an accurate, robust, and uncertainty-aware framework for preliminary prediction of 28-day fly ash concrete compressive strength.
Zhihao Zhao, Jinjin Wang, Guohui Ma et al.· Buildings· 0 citations
There has been a rise in the need of concrete leading to high consumption of cement and emission of carbon. Sustainable concrete incorporating supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) is an alternative that is eco-friendly, but the mechanical behavior is complicated and hard to predict using the traditional tests. The work presents a framework involving machine learning because of predicting the mechanical properties of sustainable concrete, namely, compressive, split tensile, and flexural strength. Four models such as Linear Regression, Support Vector Regression, Random Forest, and Artificial Neural Network were constructed based on a data of nearly 1000 sustainable concrete mixes. To estimate the model performance, R 2, RMSE and MAE were used. The findings indicated that ANN and RF had the greatest prediction accuracy. The feature analysis established the most influential factors to be water content, cement dosage, replacement ratio of SCM, and curing age. The mix design approach proposed here is a fast, economical, and sustainable approach to the design of concrete mix.
Arti Chouksey, Santosh Reddy P, P. S et al.· 2026 International Conferenc...· 0 citations
The rapid rate of urbanization and industrialization has driven the excessive use of natural resources like river sand and gravel, raising significant sustainability concerns. Waste foundry sand (WFS), a discarded by-product of ferrous and nonferrous metal casting industries, offers a promising substitute for natural sand in concrete. This study focuses on predicting the compressive strength (CS) of WFS-infused concrete by analyzing the impact of various factors, such as cement content, WFS proportion, supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), water, aggregate composition, and superplasticizer (SP) usage. A data set comprising 401 mix ratios and their corresponding strengths was developed using systematic literature review approach and analyzed using advanced machine-learning (ML) models, including extreme gradient boosting (XGB), categorial boosting (CatB), light gradient boosting, gradient boosting, decision tree,
k
-nearest neighbor, adaptive boosting, bagging regressor, and random forest. The data set was divided into training and testing subsets, and statistical evaluations were performed to determine correlations between input parameters and strength. Among the models, XGB and CatB demonstrated the highest accuracy (
R
2
=
0.98
and 0.97 for training data;
R
2
=
0.83
and 0.86 for testing data, respectively). Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) and partial dependence plot (PDP) analysis revealed that water content and curing age significantly enhanced compressive strength. Furthermore, the developed graphical user interface will help to practically estimate the compressive strength of WFS concrete without any experimental trials.
M. H. R. Sobuz, Md. Kawsarul Islam Kabbo, Abdullah Alzlfawi et al.· Journal of Structural Design...· 0 citations
Results suggest that, within the present five-fold cross-validation setting and limited-sample dataset, RBF kernel ridge regression captures the nonlinear relationships more effectively than conventional linear models; however, broader generalization should be verified using larger datasets and additional validation.
Yuchen Lin· International Conference on...· 0 citations
Accurate prediction of the mechanical strength of Basalt Fiber Reinforced Concrete (BFRC) is critical for structural design, safety assessment, and the advancement of sustainable infrastructure in civil engineering. Traditional prediction methods often fail to capture the nonlinear relationships between BFRC mix proportions and resulting strength characteristics, leading to unreliable estimations. To address this limitation, this study proposes the Optimized Moment Balanced Machine (OMBM), an advanced machine learning model developed to improve the predictive accuracy of BFRC strength parameters. The model was trained and evaluated using key input features, including cement content, silica fume, fly ash, superplasticizer, water, aggregate composition, and fiber property parameters. The performance of the OMBM was benchmarked against four established machine learning models, such as Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LSSVM), Backpropagation Neural Network (BPNN), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Linear Regression (LR). Results from ten-fold cross-validation show that OMBM consistently outperforms the comparison models across five evaluation metrics. It achieved the lowest RMSE (2.411), MAE (1.788), and MAPE (4.08%), along with the highest values for correlation coefficient (R = 0.978), and coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.956). Furthermore, the OMBM achieved a Reference Index (RI) score of 1.000, which confirms its position as the leading predictive model within this comparative framework. These results confirm the robustness and reliability of the proposed OMBM model, making it a highly effective tool for accurate strength prediction of BFRC. This approach offers significant potential for the advancement of sustainable infrastructure by enabling more accurate and efficient use of concrete materials.
R. R. Khasani, Ferry Hermawan, Yuliana Usman· IOP Conference Series: Earth...· 0 citations
This study applies several machine learning models to predict the Marshall stability of Stone Mastic Asphalt mixtures incorporating steel slag as a partial replacement for conventional coarse aggregates, with CatBoost providing the best performance.
T. Nguyen, Hoang-Long Nguyen, N. Trần et al.· Journal of Science and Trans...· 0 citations