Hybrid soil strength prediction model for geotechnical ground investigation using convolutional neural network and ensemble learning

A hybrid model of soil strength prediction from the image data and feature data of soil was proposed, which is aimed at providing an efficient solution in geotechnical ground investigation by leveraging the power of AI. In this model, CNN purely with the encoder was used to establish the relationship between image data and strength parameters of soil, while ensemble learning stacked of three base learners, i.e., KNN, LASSO, and LSVM, was applied to the feature data. Then, the CNN part and the ensemble learning part were integrated into the loss function. Results show that the convergence of the hybrid model was slower than that of the ensemble learner. However, with the aid of soil image which has more features of soil in essence, the predicted soil strengths by the hybrid model better matched with the actual ones, compared with the ensemble learner and base learners. This hybrid model offers an effective framework of multi-modal data fusion for geotechnical engineering, by leveraging the synergy of the high-dimensional feature extraction capabilities of CNN and the generalization abilities of ensemble learning.