Prediction of ultimate axial load-carrying capacity of piles using a support vector machine based on CPT data

The support vector machine (SVM) is a relatively new artificial intelligence technique which is increasingly being applied to geotechnical problems and is yielding encouraging results. In this paper SVM models are developed for predicting the ultimate axial load-carrying capacity of piles based on cone penetration test (CPT) data. A data set of 108 samples is used to develop the SVM models. These data were obtained from the literature containing pile load tests and each sample contains information regarding pile geometry, full-scale static pile load tests and CPT results. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is carried out to examine the relative significance of each input variable with respect to ultimate strength prediction. Finally, a statistical analysis is conducted to make comparisons between predictions obtained from the SVM models and three traditional CPT-based methods for determining pile capacity. The comparison confirms that the SVM models developed in this paper outperform the traditional methods.