Owing to a rapid increase in waste, waste management has become essential, for which waste generation (WG) information has been effectively utilized. Various studies have recently focused on the development of reliable predictive models by applying artificial intelligence to the construction and prediction of WG information. In this study, research was conducted on the development of machine learning (ML) models for predicting the demolition waste generation rate (DWGR) of buildings in redevelopment areas in South Korea. Various ML algorithms (i.e., artificial neural network (ANN), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), linear regression (LR), random forest (RF), and support vector machine (SVM)) were applied to the development of an optimal predictive model, and the main hyper parameters (HPs) for each algorithm were optimized. The results suggest that ANN-ReLu (coefficient of determination (R2) 0.900, the ratio of percent deviation (RPD) 3.16), SVM-polynomial (R2 0.889, RPD 3.00), and ANN-logistic (R2 0.883, RPD 2.92) are the best ML models for predicting the DWGR. They showed average errors of 7.3%, 7.4%, and 7.5%, respectively, compared to the average observed values, confirming the accurate predictive performance, and in the uncertainty analysis, the d-factor of the models appeared less than 1, showing that the presented models are reliable. Through a comparison with ML algorithms and HPs applied in previous related studies, the results herein also showed that the selection of various ML algorithms and HPs is important in developing optimal ML models for WG management.
Keywords: demolition waste; machine learning; optimal predictive model; redevelopment area; waste generation rate; waste management.