- Research Article
- 10.1080/15623599.2026.2643744
Research on the prediction of cost for ultra high-rise buildings based on the PSO algorithm with Spearman correlation feature selection
- Mar 15, 2026
- International Journal of Construction Management
- Feng Xu + 7 more +7
Predicting the cost of ultra-high-rise buildings is a complex and challenging task. To address the limitations of existing models in practical applications, this study first employs Spearman correlation analysis to identify features highly relevant to construction costs. Subsequently, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is utilized to automatically optimize the hyperparameters of Support Vector Machines (SVM), Backpropagation Neural Networks (BPNN), Extreme Learning Machines (ELM), and Random Forest (RF) models, resulting in the development of four advanced hybrid predictive models: ρ-PSO-SVM, ρ-PSO-BPNN, ρ-PSO-ELM, and ρ-PSO-RF. Among these, the ρ-PSO-SVM model achieved the best performance with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 5.235, a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 3.996, a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 4.407, a Coefficient of Determination (R2) of 0.993, an A20 index of 1.000. The predictive performance of these models is systematically evaluated on a dataset comprising 178 ultra-high-rise building projects. Furthermore, a case study is conducted to compare the proposed hybrid models with Building Information Modeling (BIM)-based cost estimation methods. The results demonstrate that incorporating Spearman correlation analysis significantly enhances predictive performance, validating the applicability and effectiveness of this approach in forecasting the costs of ultra high-rise building projects.
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