Prediction of soil compression coefficient for urban housing project using novel integration machine learning approach of swarm intelligence and Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network

In many engineering projects, the soil compression coefficient is an important parameter used for estimating the settlement of soil layers. The common practice of determining the soil compression coefficient via the oedometer test is time-consuming and expensive. This study proposes a machine learning solution to replace the conventional tests used for obtaining the coefficient of soil compression. The new approach is an integration of the Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network (MLP Neural Nets) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). These two computational intelligence methods work synergistically to establish a prediction model of soil compression coefficient. The PSO metaheuristic is employed to optimize the MLP Neural Nets model structure. To train and validate the proposed method, named as PSO-MLP Neural Nets, a dataset of 154 soil samples featuring 12 influencing factors has been collected from the geotechnical investigation process of a high-rise building project. Experimental results show that the proposed PSO-MLP Neural Nets has attained the most accurate prediction of the soil compression coefficient performance with RMSE = 0.0267, MAE = 0.0145, and R² = 0.884. The result of the proposed model is significantly better than those obtained from other benchmark methods including the backpropagation neural network, the radial basis function neural network, the support vector regression, the random forest, and the Gaussian process. Based on the experimental results, the newly constructed PSO-MLP Neural Nets is very potential to be a new alternative to assist geotechnical engineers in design phase of civil engineering projects.