Enhancing local road pavement condition prediction using Bayesian-optimized ensemble machine learning and adaptive synthetic sampling technique.

Elshaboury, Nehal; Yamany, Mohamed S.; Labi, Samuel; Smadi, Omar

Pavement condition prediction helps road agencies to schedule maintenance, rehabilitation, and reconstruction, and to allocate limited funds and resources to such activities. Compared to state highways, pavement performance prediction for local roads has received relatively little attention in the literature due to perceptions of low importance, low levels of investment in data collection, poor data quality, and high variation within the data elements. Additionally, local road pavement condition data may suffer from dataset imbalance, often leading to unreliable condition predictions. Hence, this paper introduces a methodology to predict local pavement condition using various single estimator and ensemble machine learning (ML) models along with the adaptive synthetic sampling method. The study develops nine (9) Bayesian-optimised ML models: category boosting (CatBoost), adaptive boosting, decision tree, extra trees, gradient boosting, light gradient-boosting machine, k-nearest neighbour, random forest, and artificial neural network. The ensemble ML and CatBoost were found to exhibit the best model performance, with an average testing accuracy of 0.82, specificity of 0.81, sensitivity of 0.63, and F-measure of 0.61. These results underscore the efficacy of ensemble ML models in pavement condition prediction. The proposed approach can be beneficial to local road agencies in their long-term planning, scheduling, and budgeting.

ARTIFICIAL neural networks; MACHINE learning; RANDOM forest algorithms; DECISION trees; PAVEMENTS

International Journal of Pavement Engineering, 2024, Vol 25, Issue 1, p1

1029-8436

Academic Journal

10.1080/10298436.2024.2365957