An Effective Hybrid Model of ELM and Enhanced GWO for Estimating Compressive Strength of Metakaolin-Contained Cemented Materials

This research proposes a highly effective soft computing paradigm for estimating the compressive strength (CS) of metakaolin-contained cemented materials. The proposed approach is a combination of an enhanced grey wolf optimizer (EGWO) and an extreme learning machine (ELM). EGWO is an augmented form of the classic grey wolf optimizer (GWO). Compared to standard GWO, EGWO has a better hunting mechanism and produces an optimal performance. The EGWO was used to optimize the ELM structure and a hybrid model, ELM-EGWO, was built. To train and validate the proposed ELM-EGWO model, a sum of 361 experimental results featuring five influencing factors was collected. Based on sensitivity analysis, three distinct cases of influencing parameters were considered to investigate the effect of influencing factors on predictive precision. Experimental consequences show that the constructed ELM-EGWO achieved the most accurate precision in both training (RMSE = 0.0959) and testing (RMSE = 0.0912) phases. The outcomes of the ELM-EGWO are significantly superior to those of deep neural networks (DNN), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and other hybrid ELMs constructed with GWO, particle swarm optimization (PSO), harris hawks optimization (HHO), salp swarm algorithm (SSA), marine predators algorithm (MPA), and colony predation algorithm (CPA). The overall results demonstrate that the newly suggested ELM-EGWO has the potential to estimate the CS of metakaolin-contained cemented materials with a high degree of precision and robustness.