The rapid growth of modular construction has increased the demand for accurate and computationally efficient methods for predicting the shear performance of cold-formed steel members. Modular construction-optimised beams, characterised by a mono-symmetric triangular hollow flange geometry, exhibit shear behaviour that is not well represented by existing analytical formulations. This study proposes an explainable machine learning framework to predict the ultimate shear capacity of cold-formed steel modular construction-optimised beams using a validated finite-element dataset comprising 105 parametric models. Six supervised machine learning algorithms are trained and evaluated using resampling-based validation and statistical performance metrics. Categorical boosting achieved the best predictive performance, with a coefficient of determination of 95.9% and a mean absolute percentage error of 6.49% under 50 repeated train and test splits. Model transparency is supported using Shapley Additive Explanations, which confirm thickness and yield strength as the most influential inputs within the investigated domain. In addition, prediction uncertainty was quantified using empirical 95% prediction intervals, and the modelling workflow was strengthened by explicitly defining reproducibility and no-leakage conditions. Overall, the proposed framework provides an efficient and interpretable finite element surrogate tool for rapid design-oriented estimation of modular construction-optimised beam shear capacity within the defined parameter ranges and loading configuration.
Gray et al. (2026) studied this question.