Intelligent Design of Construction Materials: A Comparative Study of AI Approaches for Predicting the Strength of Concrete with Blast Furnace Slag

Concrete production by replacing cement with green materials has been conducted in recent years considering the strategy of sustainable development. This study researched the topic of compressive strength regarding one type of green concrete containing blast furnace slag. Although some researchers have proposed using machine learning models to predict the compressive strength of concrete, few researchers have compared the prediction accuracy of different machine learning models on the compressive strength of concrete. Firstly, the hyperparameters of BP neural network (BPNN), support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), K-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN), logistic regression (LR), and multiple linear regression (MLR) are tuned by the beetle antennae search algorithm (BAS). Then, the prediction effects of the above seven machine learning models on the compressive strength of concrete are evaluated and compared. The comparison results show that KNN has higher R values and lower RSME values both in the training set and test set; that is, KNN is the best model for predicting the compressive strength of concrete among the seven machine learning models mentioned above.