Prediction of lightweight concrete strength by categorized regression, MLR and ANN

Prediction of concrete properties is an important issue for structural engineers and different methods are developed for this purpose. Most of these methods are based on experimental data and use measured data for parameter estimation. Three typical methods of output estimation are Categorized Linear Regression (CLR), Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). In this paper a statistical cleansing method based on CLR is introduced. Afterwards, MLR and ANN approaches are also employed to predict the compressive strength of structural lightweight aggregate concrete. The valid input domain is briefly discussed. Finally the results of three prediction methods are compared to determine the most efficient method. The results indicate that despite higher accuracy of ANN, there are some limitations for the method. These limitations include high sensitivity of method to its valid input domain and selection criteria for determining the most efficient network.