Estimation of pressuremeter modulus and limit pressure of clayey soils by various artificial neural network models

The main purpose of the present study is to develop some artificial neural network (ANN) models for the prediction of limit pressure (P _L) and pressuremeter modulus (E _M) for clayey soils. Moisture content, plasticity index, and SPT values are used as inputs in the ANN models. To get plausible results, the number of hidden layer neurons in all models is varied between 1 and 5. In addition, both linear and nonlinear activation functions are considered for the neurons in output layers while a nonlinear activation function is employed for the neurons in the hidden layers of all models. Logistic activation function is used as a nonlinear activation function. During the modeling studies, total eight different ANN models are constructed. The ANN models having two outputs produced the worst results, independent from activation function. However, for P _L, the best results are obtained from the feed-forward neural network with five neurons in the hidden layer, and logistic activation function is employed in the output neuron. For E _M, the best model producing the most acceptable results is Elman recurrent network model, which has 4 neurons in the neurons in the hidden layer, and linear activation function is used for the output neuron. Finally, the results show that the ANN models produce the more accurate results than the regression-based models. In the literature, when empirical equations based on regression analysis were used, the best root mean square error (RMSE) values obtained to date for P _L and E _M have been 0.43 and 5.65, respectively. In this study, RMSE values for P _L and E _M were found to be 0.20 and 2.99, respectively, by using ANN models. It was observed that using ANN approach drastically increases the prediction accuracy in terms of RMSE criterion.