Artificial neural network optimized by differential evolution for predicting diameters of jet grouted columns

A novel and effective artificial neural network (ANN) optimized using differential evolution (DE) is first introduced to provide a robust and reliable forecasting of jet grouted column diameters. The proposed computational method adopts the DE algorithm to tackle the difficulties in the training and performance of neural networks and optimize the four quintessential hyper-parameters (i.e. the epoch size, the number of neurons in a hidden layer, the number of hidden layers, and the regularization parameter) that govern the neural network efficacy. This approach is further enhanced by a stochastic gradient optimization algorithm to allow ‘expensive’ computation efforts. The ANN-DE is first trained using a prepared jet grouting dataset, then verified and compared with the prevalent machine learning tools, i.e. neural networks and support vector machine (SVM). The results show that, the ANN-DE outperforms the existing methods for predicting the diameter of jet grouting columns since it well balances training efficiency and model performance. Specifically, the ANN-DE achieved root mean square error (RMSE) values of 0.90603 and 0.92813 for the training and testing phases, respectively. The corresponding values were 0.8905 and 0.9006 for the optimized ANN, then, 0.87569 and 0.89968 for the optimized SVM, respectively. The proposed paradigm is bound to be useful for solving various geotechnical engineering problems regardless of multi-dimension and nonlinearity.