Predicting High-Performance Concrete Compressive Strength Using Features Constructed by Kaizen Programming

The compressive strength of high-performance concrete (HPC) can be predicted by a nonlinear function of the proportions of its components. However, HPC is a complex material, and finding that nonlinear function is not trivial. Many distinct techniques such as traditional statistical regression methods and machine learning methods have been used to solve this task, reaching considerably different levels of accuracy. In this paper, we employ the recently proposed Kaizen Programming coupled with classical Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression to find high-quality nonlinear combinations of the original features, resulting in new sets of features. Those new features are then tested with various regression techniques to perform prediction. Experimental results show that the features constructed by our technique provide significantly better results than the original ones. Moreover, when compared to similar evolutionary approaches, Kaizen Programming builds only a small fraction of the number of prediction models, but reaches similar or better results.