Prediction of the mechanical behavior of the Oporto granite using Data Mining techniques

The determination of mechanical properties of granitic rocks has a great importance to solve many engineering problems. Tunnelling, mining and excavations are some examples of these problems. The purpose of this paper is to apply Data Mining (DM) techniques such as multiple regressions (MR), artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM), to predict the uniaxial compressive strength and the deformation modulus of the Oporto granite. This rock is a light grey, two-mica, medium-grained, hypidiomorphic granite and is located in Oporto (Portugal) and surrounding areas. Begonha (1997) and Begonha and Sequeira Braga (2002) studied this granite in terms of chemical, mineralogical, physical and mechanical properties. Among other things, like the weathering features, those authors applied correlation analysis to investigate the relationships between two properties either physical or mechanical or physical and mechanical. This study took the data published by those authors to build a database containing 55 rock sample records. Each record contains the free porosity (N-48), the dry bulk density (d), the ultrasonic velocity (v), the uniaxial compressive strength (sigma(c)) and the modulus of elasticity (E). It was concluded that all the models obtained from DM techniques have good performances. Nevertheless, the best forecasting capacity was obtained with the SVM model with N-48 and v as input parameters. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.