Construction cost estimation of reinforced and prestressed concrete bridges using machine learning

Seven state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for estimation of construction costs of reinforced-concrete and prestressed concrete bridges are investigated in this paper, including artificial neural networks (ANN) and ensembles of ANNs, regression tree ensembles (random forests, boosted and bagged regression trees), support vector regression (SVR) method, and Gaussian process regression (GPR). A database of construction costs and design characteristics for 181 reinforced-concrete and prestressed-concrete bridges is created for model training and evaluation.