Investigation on factors affecting early strength of high-performance concrete by Gaussian Process Regression

This study aims to investigate the influence of all the mixture components of high-performance concrete (HPC) on its early compressive strength, ranging from 1 to 14 days. To this purpose, a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) algorithm was first constructed using a database gathered from the available literature. The database included the contents of cement, blast furnace slag (BFS), fly ash (FA), water, superplasticizer, coarse, fine aggregates, and testing age as input variables to predict the output of the problem, which was the early compressive strength. Several standard statistical criteria, such as the Pearson correlation coefficient, root mean square error and mean absolute error, were used to quantify the performance of the GPR model. To analyze the sensitivity and influence of the HPC mixture components, partial dependence plots analysis was conducted with both one-dimensional and two-dimensional. Firstly, the results showed that the GPR performed well in predicting the early strength of HPC. Second, it was determined that the cement content and testing age of HPC were the most sensitive and significant elements affecting the early strength of HPC, followed by the BFS, water, superplasticizer, FA, fine aggregate, and coarse aggregate contents. To put it simply, this research might assist engineers select the appropriate amount of mixture components in the HPC production process to obtain the necessary early compressive strength.