Improving Accuracy of Early Stage Cost Estimation by Revising Categorical Variables in a Case-Based Reasoning Model

Abstract

AbstractFor the overall success of a construction project, it is very important to accurately estimate the construction cost from the early stage. However, the limited information available in the early stage makes the cost estimation challenging. Recently, there has been an increase in the use of case-based reasoning (CBR) to estimate construction cost in the early stage. Based on the hypothesis that similar problems have similar solutions, CBR searches for the most similar cases (e.g., previous projects) for a given problem (e.g., a new project). However, because no previous project is exactly the same as a new project, the solutions applied to the past project may not work for the new project, especially when there are no sufficient cases stored in the case base. To overcome this limitation, some studies have highlighted the importance of revision algorithms to account for the deviation of the new project and the identified similar past projects. These studies, however, were limited in considering the ...