Estimating the compressive strength of rectangular fiber reinforced polymer–confined columns using multilayer perceptron, radial basis function, and support vector regression methods

Abstract

Recently, there has been a tendency to use machine learning (ML)–based methods, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs), for more accurate estimates. This paper investigates the effectiveness of three different machine learning methods including radial basis function neural network (RBNN), multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and support vector regression (SVR), for predicting the ultimate strength of square and rectangular columns confined by various FRP sheets. So far, in the previous study, several experiments have been conducted on concrete columns confined by fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) sheets with the results suggesting that the use of FRP sheets enhances the compressive strength of concrete columns effectively. Also, a wide range of experimental data (including 463 specimens) has been collected in this study for square and rectangular columns, confined by various FRP sheets. The comparison of ML-derived results with the experimental findings, which were in a very good agreement, demonstrated the ability of ML to estimate the compressive strength of concrete confined by FRP; the correlation coefficient (R2) for MLP, RBFNN, and SVR methods was equal to 0.97, 0.97, and 0.90, respectively. Similar accuracy was obtained by MLP and RBFNN, and they provided better estimates for determining the compressive strength of concrete confined by FRP. Also, the results showed that the difference between statistical indicators for training and testing specimens in the RBFNN method was greater than the MLP method, and this difference indicated the poor performance of RBFNN.