LSTM-Based Forecasting for Urban Construction Waste Generation

Accurate forecasts of construction waste are important for recycling the waste and formulating relevant governmental policies. Deficiencies in reliable forecasting methods and historical data hinder the prediction of this waste in long- or short-term planning. To effectively forecast construction waste, a time-series forecasting method is proposed in this study, based on a three-layer long short-term memory (LSTM) network and univariate time-series data with limited sample points. This method involves network structure design and implementation algorithms for network training and the forecasting process. Numerical experiments were performed with statistical construction waste data for Shanghai and Hong Kong. Compared with other time-series forecasting models such as ridge regression (RR), support vector regression (SVR), and back-propagation neural networks (BPNN), this paper demonstrates that the proposed LSTM-based forecasting model is effective and accurate in predicting construction waste generation.