Artificial intelligence-based pre-conception stage construction budget decision-making model and tool for residential buildings

Purpose Developing a reliable cost estimate at the early stage of construction projects is challenging due to inadequate project information. Most of the information during this stage is qualitative, posing additional challenges to achieving accurate cost estimates. Additionally, there is a lack of tools that use qualitative project information and forecast the budgets required for project completion. This research, therefore, aims to develop a model for setting project budgets (excluding land) during the pre-conceptual stage of residential buildings, where project information is mainly qualitative. Design/methodology/approach Due to the qualitative nature of project information at the pre-conception stage, a natural language processing model, DistilBERT (Distilled Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), was trained to predict the cost range of residential buildings at the pre-conception stage. The training and evaluation data included 63, 899 building permit activity records (2021–2022) from the Victorian State Building Authority, Australia. The input data comprised the project description of each record, which included project location and basic material types (floor, frame, roofing, and external wall). Findings This research designed a novel tool for predicting the project budget based on preliminary project information. The model achieved 79% accuracy in classifying residential buildings into three costclasses (100, 000-300, 000, 300, 000-500, 000, 500, 000-1, 200, 000) and F1-scores of 0. 85, 0. 73, and 0. 74, respectively. Additionally, the results show that the model learnt the contextual relationship between qualitative data like project location and cost. Research limitations/implications The current model was developed using data from Victoria state in Australia; hence, it would not return relevant outcomes for other contexts. However, future studies can adopt the methods to develop similar models for their context. Originality/value This research is the first to leverage a deep learning model, DistilBERT, for cost estimation at the pre-conception stage using basic project information like location and material types. Therefore, the model would contribute to overcoming data limitations for cost estimation at the pre-conception stage. Residential building stakeholders, like clients, designers, and estimators, can use the model to forecast the project budget at the pre-conception stage to facilitate decision-making.