Hybrid intelligence approach based on LS-SVM and Differential Evolution for construction cost index estimation: A Taiwan case study

• An intelligence system for modeling construction cost index variations is proposed.
• The new method is developed based on the fusion of LS-SVM and DE.
• A database consisting of 122 cases is collected to train and test the system.
• The system performance is demonstrated in the experimental result.

In construction industry, cost escalation is a major cause of project failure. The reason is that construction prices fluctuate over time and they are influenced by numerous factors. This study establishes a hybrid intelligence system, named as ELSVM, for modeling construction price variations quantified by the construction cost index (CCI). The proposed method is developed based on the fusion of Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) and Differential Evolution (DE). LS-SVM is used for mining the mapping function between CCI and its causative input factors. Meanwhile, DE is employed to optimize LS-SVM tuning parameters. In this research, a database consisting of 122 historical cases was collected to establish the intelligence system. Based on experimental results, ELSVM can successfully model CCI fluctuations since it has achieved a comparatively low MAPE which is less than 1%. Thus, the proposed system can be a promising tool to assist decision-makers in construction management.