Engineering with Computers (2018) 34:347–356

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-017-0545-7

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Optimizing an ANN model with ICA for estimating bearing capacity

of driven pile in cohesionless soil
Hossein Moayedi1 · Danial Jahed Armaghani2

Received: 3 February 2017 / Accepted: 10 November 2017 / Published online: 16 November 2017
© Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2017

Abstract
The application of models provided by artificial neural network (ANN) in predicting bearing capacity of driven pile is under-
lined in several investigations. However, weakness of ANN in slow rate of convergence as well as finding reliable testing
output is known to be the major drawbacks of implementing ANN-based techniques. The present study aims to introduce
and evaluate an optimized ANN with imperialism competitive algorithm (ICA) model based to estimate bearing capacity
of driven pile in cohesionless soil. The training data for optimizing the ICA-ANN structure are based on the in situ study.
To develop the ICA-ANN model, the input parameters are internal friction angle of soil located in shaft (φ shaft), and tip (φ
tip), pile length (L), effective vertical stress at pile toe (σv), and pile area (A) while the output is the total driven pile bear-
ing capacity in cohesionless soil. The predicted results are compared with a pre-developed ANN model to demonstrate the
ability of the hybrid model. As a result, coefficient of determination (R2) values of (0.885 and 0.894) and (0.964 and 0.974)
was obtained for testing and training datasets of ANN and ICA-ANN models, respectively. In addition, values of variance
account for (VAF) of (88.212 for training and 89.215 for testing) and (96.369 for training and 97.369 for testing, respectively)
were obtained for ANN and ICA-ANN models, respectively. The obtained results declare high reliability of the developed
ICA-ANN model. This model can be introduced as a new model in field of deep foundation engineering.

Keywords Driven pile · ICA-ANN · ANN · Cohesionless soil · Bearing capacity · Optimization.

1 Introduction complex problems represents an area of investigation that

Parametric studies of pile (i.e., both driven and bored types)
response during dynamic and static load experiments are
generally too costly and time consuming to conduct in the
field and may be limited by scaling effects at model scale
[1, 2]. In addition, there is a need for conducting several
field tests in each project. Considering the cost of each field
test, reducing the number of required tests could be of inter-
est as it can reduce the total cost of a project [3]. This can
be performed proposing intelligent techniques. The extent
of implementing artificial neural network (ANN) to solve
* Danial Jahed Armaghani
danialarmaghani@gmail.com
Hossein Moayedi
h.moayedi@kut.ac.ir
1
Department of Civil Engineering, Kermanshah University
of Technology, Kermanshah, Iran
2
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran 15914, Iran
has recently gained attention in the geotechnical engineering
[4–13]. This is due to its ability in finding complex nonlinear
relationships among different parameters. There are numer-
ous studies on using the ANN-based model to predict pile
settlements [14], bearing capacity of the pile foundation,
lateral load capacity of piles [15], efficiency of pile groups
installed in sandy soil [16], driven piles in cohesionless soils
[17], using SPT-based methods predicting toe bearing capac-
ity of driven piles [18] as well as base resistance of open-
ended piles [19]. Randolph et al. [20] investigated on design
of driven piles in sand. His study provided a design approach
considers the effects of confining stress on the compress-
ibility and frictional characteristics of sand and, therefore,
on end-bearing capacity. The resulting design approach is
finally compared with in situ data, and the effects of key
factors such as the direction of loading are thoroughly dis-
cussed. Alawneh et al. [21] worked on the driven pile axial
compressive capacity in cohesionless sand. This solution
included post-driving residual stresses. A new empirical for-
mulae were proposed between friction angle of sand, relative

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density, average effective vertical stress, deformability of the
soil beneath the pile toe, and the well-known bearing capac-
ity factor of the piles (Nq and β). A database comprising 28
axially compressive pile load tests were collected. Compari-
son of measured and predicted compressive capacity of an
independent database indicated that the proposed formula is
reliable and accurate. Yang et al. [22] emphasized the behav-
ior of jacked and driven piles in sandy soil. This paper illus-
trates a comprehensive is situ investigation that was aimed
to study the similarities and differences between the behav-
ior of driven H-piles and jacked H-piles. The instrumented
piles varied in pile length from 32 to 55 m and having a
pile design bearing capacity of up to 3540 kN. A correla-
tion was observed between the mean standard penetration
test (N) value and the ultimate shaft friction, which sug-
gests that the shaft friction capacity can be taken as 1.5 (N)
over bar to 2 (N) over bar (kPa) for both jacked and driven
H-piles. Lee et al. [23] investigated on the combined load
(i.e., vertical and lateral load) response of driven pile mod-
els in sand experimentally. A series of lateral load experi-
ments were conducted on the pile simultaneously subjected
to vertical loads. The results of combined load test indicated
that the presence of a vertical compression load (driven pile
installed in sand) is detrimental to its lateral capacity. As a
result, the bending moments, in the presence of axial loads,
at the pile head were substantially increased (by 10, 36 and
39% for loose, medium dense and dense sand, respectively).
Samui [24] adopted an MARS (multivariate adaptive regres-
sion spline) approach to determine the ultimate capacity of
driven piles installed in sands. MARS approach used differ-
ent parameters consisting of driven pile area (A), angle of
shear resistance of the soil surrounding the shaft (φ shaft)
and soil at the tip of the derived pile (φ tip), pile length (L),
and effective vertical stress at the tip of the pile (σv) as input
variables, where the output of MARS is taken to be pile
ultimate bearing capacity. The results of MARS are com-
pared with other developed ANN based such as the GRNN
model (Generalized Regression Neural Network model).
Finally, an equation was provided based on the proposed
MARS. Dzagov and Razvodovskii [25] investigated on the
driven pile bearing capacity in clays. With respect to the sur-
rounding soil properties and pile length, driven piles could
provide the basic characteristics to be known as both end-
bearing and/or friction piles. Momeni et al. [3] developed a
new hybrid ANN-GA (genetic algorithm) based on predict-
ing pile bearing capacity. The hammer weight, geometrical
properties of pile, pile set, and drop height were taken to
be the network inputs and, on the other hand, the ultimate
bearing capacity of the pile was considered to be the output
of the proposed GA-based ANN model. Results indicate that
the predicted pile bearing capacities by proposed model are
in excellent agreement with measured values in the field.
Momeni et al. [26] applied ANN for predicting tip and shaft
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Engineering with Computers (2018) 34:347–356
resistances of concrete piles. In this study, an ANN-based
predictive model for estimating axial bearing capacity of
bored piles and its distribution is developed. To construct
the network, 36 PDA (pile driving analyzer) experiments
were undertaken on various concrete piles. The data are
collected from different project sites. The PDA results, pile
geometrical characteristics as well as soil investigation data
were used for training the ANN models. Findings indicate
the feasibility of ANN in predicting ultimate, shaft and tip
bearing resistances of piles. The coefficients of determina-
tion, R2, equal to 0.941, 0.936, and 0.951 for testing data
illustrate that the shaft, tip and ultimate bearing capacities of
piles predicted by proposed ANN-based model are in good
agreement with those of in situ pile. In addition, after sensi-
tivity analysis, it was observed that the area and length of the
piles are dominant factors in the developed predictive model.
The main objectives of the present study are to find a new
reliable mathematical equation to estimate the total bearing
capacity of the driven pile installed in cohesionless soil. It
is also aimed to assess the influence of important param-
eters such as internal friction angle of soil located in shaft
(φ shaft), and tip (φ tip), pile length (L), effective vertical
stress at pile toe (σv), and pile area (A) on predicted output.
2 Methods
2.1 Artificial neural network (ANN)
The ANN is a tool to model the complex systems in approxi-
mation problems such as medicine, finance and engineer-
ing. ANN is a data-processing analysis system making a
simulation of the structure and functions of human brain. It
is an extremely interconnected multilayer structure includ-
ing a large number of neurons. This network is enable to
recognize similarities, especially when they are presented
with new input terms after properly predicting the proposed
output pattern. The ANN is generally applicable as an alter-
native for some complex statistical analysis techniques such
as autocorrelation, trigonometric, multivariable regression,
and linear regression. It is a well-established network that
can be defined using three basic components known as: (1)
transfer function, (2) network architecture, and (3) learn-
ing law [27]. These components are considered to select
the most appropriate model for a given problem(s). Up to
now, numerous algorithms have been suggested to train
the neural networks, among which the feedforward neural
networks (FFNN) and back-propagation (BP) algorithm are
known as the most reliable and accurate technique [28, 29].
For instance, BP can solve predictive complex geotechnical
problems; it makes back-propagation so popular among all
existing algorithms for training ANN. The FFNN are the
most common neural networks consisting of multiple hidden
Engineering with Computers (2018) 34:347–356
layers containing weight matrices, bias vectors and nonlinear
transfer functions. Using such a network, it is possible to
find nonlinear complicated relations between inputs and out-
put data sets via a training procedure. The neural networks
extracted relations are not exact and there is always an error
between the networks estimated data and the real data. The
components of weight and bias are tunable constants which
should be tuned to minimize the network error. The process
of tuning of these constants is called training of network.
The act of training is similar to an optimization process.
Various mathematical approaches are used to train the neural
networks. Most of these approaches are basically analytical
such as Levenberg Marquardt (LM), Bayesian regularization
(BR), and BFGS quasi-Newton (BFG). LM approach is used
for batch training of the networks in this paper.
2.2 Imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA)
Imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) is firstly proposed
by Atashpaz-Gargari and Lucas [30] to be used in optimiza-
tion problems. It is a global search population-based sys-
tem that its process is similar to many other evolutionary
algorithms. ICA gets started with an initial population (or
candidate solutions), that with the ICA consists of countries.
These countries are then divided into two categories: impe-
rialists (i.e., some of the best countries) and colonies (i.e.,
the remaining countries) (see Fig. 1). To generate empires
the colonies are distributed among the imperialists, as deter-
mined by a pre-defined criterion, according to their rela-
tive strength. The empires then compete with each other to
expand their power and control more colonies. Therefore, as
Fig. 1  Imperialistic competition
to take possession of weakest
colony from [30]
349
a result of looping this competition, stronger empires expand
their power by taking possession of weak colonies located in
weaker empires. This process is continuously repeated until
the process stopped after being satisfied by a pre-defined
stopping criterion. A detailed description of the designed
steps in ICA algorithm alone is widely available in the litera-
ture. The readers are recommended to see Armaghani et al.
[31], Ghorbani and Jokar [32] and Al Dossary and Nasrabadi
[33] for more detail of ICA.
2.3 Combination of ICA‑ANN
Many attempts have been conducted to improve the perfor-
mance of ANNs through the use of optimization algorithms
(OAs) like ICA, particle swarm optimization and genetic
algorithm in engineering problems (e.g.[11, 28, 34–37]).
Since BP is a local search learning algorithm, the optimum
search process of ANN may fail and return unsatisfied solu-
tion [38]. OAs can be utilized to adjust the bias and weight
of the ANN to improve its performance level. Regarding
the local minimum in ANN system, there is normally more
probability of convergence, while OAs are able to discover
a global minimum. So, hybrid systems like ICA-ANN enjoy
search properties of all ANN and ICA techniques. In search
space, ICA searches for global minimum, and then ANN
employs it for finding the best results of the system.
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3 Established database
In previous section, structure of the ICA-ANN is introduced
and discussed. The data used for development of the predic-
tive models in this study are collected from Mohanty et al.
[39] comprising an extensive in-situ driven pile load tests
from the installed location. To train predictive models, a
database including 47 datasets is used for training and 12
in situ experiments are used for testing. All 59 used data-
sets in this study are tabulated in Table 1. In this table, the
in situ test results together with their effective parameters
are presented. In the predictive models, angle of shear resist-
ance of soil at the shaft (φ shaft) and at the tip (φ tip) of
the pile, effective overburden pressure (σ′v) at the tip of the
pile, length of pile (L) and cross-sectional area of pile (A)
were utilized as model inputs. In the following section, the
process of ANN and ICA-ANN models will be presented.
4 Prediction of ultimate bearing capacity
In the present section, two predictive approaches, namely
pre-developed ANN and hybrid ICA-ANN were designed
to estimate ultimate bearing capacity of driven pile. Many
models were constructed using various values of the effec-
tive parameters on ANN and ICA-ANN. In the follow-
ing subsections, procedure of their modeling is explained
clearly.
4.1 ANN
At the beginning of ANN modeling, as mentioned by Liou
et al. [38], the developed datasets should be normalized to
simplify the design procedure using the following equation:
(1)
( ) ( )
Xnorm = X − Xmin ∕ Xmax − Xmin
where X and Xnorm are the measured and normalized values,
respectively. Xmax and Xmin are the maximum and minimum
values of the X.
Then, for developing and evaluating the model, all
datasets should be divided into training and testing parts,
respectively. A range of (20–30%) of whole datasets were
recommended for testing datasets in the investigation con-
ducted by Nelson and Illingworth [40]. So, in this study,
20% of whole datasets (59 datasets) were considered as
testing datasets. Many investigations reported the success-
ful utilization of LM training algorithm [41, 42]. Because
of that, in this study, the mentioned algorithm was utilized
to design ANN. Additionally, it is well established that an
ANN with one hidden layer can approximate any continuous
function. For determining the No. of hidden node, Hornik
et al. [43] stated that the maximum number of hidden node
is ≤ 2 × Ni + 1, where Ni is the number of input layers. Based
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Engineering with Computers (2018) 34:347–356
on this equation and Ni = 5, it seems that a range of 1–11 can
be solved bearing capacity problem. A series of ANN mod-
els were analyzed and their results were evaluated accord-
ing to RMSE values as presented in Table 2. Each model
was iterated five times. RMSE was selected as one of the
most popular performance indices to evaluate the predictive
models. Average RMSE values presented in the last column
of Table 2 show that iterations with 9 hidden nodes (0.075
and 0.066 for training and testing datasets, respectively)
are the best among all constructed models. Therefore, the
architecture of 5 × 9 × 1 was selected as the optimum ANN
architecture to predict ultimate bearing capacity of driven
pile. Evaluation of the iterations 1–5 of model no. 9 is dis-
cussed later.
4.2 ICA‑ANN
In modeling of ICA-ANN, the most important factors on
ICA should be investigated and subsequently designed.
The most important factors on ICA are Ncountry, Nimp and
Ndecade. Various values of Ncountry have been utilized to
approximate problems of geotechnical engineering. The
values of 40, 56, and 135 were recommended for Ncountry
by Ahmadi et al. [44], Marto et al. [45], and Hajihassani
et al. [46], respectively. Based on the results of the men-
tioned studies, it seems that a parametric study is needed to
obtain the proper Ncountry. Therefore, a series of ICA-ANN
analyses were conducted using various Ncountr ranging from
25 to 500. In these models, Ndecade equal to 200 and Nimp
equal to 5 were utilized. The obtained results showed that
Ncountry = 300 can provide higher performance capacity of
the ICA-ANN models in comparison with the other Ncountry.
Therefore, value of 300 was selected as optimum Ncountry in
modeling of ICA-ANN.
In the next stage of ICA-ANN, there is a need to obtain
the optimum ­Nimp considering another sensitivity analysis.
In this regard, a range of 5–65 for Nimp was used to deter-
mine the best Nimp in modeling of ultimate bearing capac-
ity of driven pile. Based on the obtained results, Nimp = 15
shows better network performance compared to other num-
ber of imperialists. Therefore, this value was considered as
optimum Nimp. Determining Ndecade is considered as the next
stage of ICA-ANN modeling procedure. Another parametric
study was conducted to investigate the effect of the Ndecade
on performance of the network. To achieve this aim, the
Ndecade was set to be 500 in this study. Figure 2 displays
network’ results of using different number of Ndecade in esti-
mating ultimate bearing capacity of driven pile. As it can
be seen, the changes in the network performance (RMSE)
after Ndecade = 350 are not significant and remarkable. As
mentioned earlier, RMSE as one of the most popular perfor-
mance indices to evaluate predictive models was chosen in
determining Ndecade in this study. Hence, the optimum Ndecade
Engineering with Computers (2018) 34:347–356 351

Table 1  Training database used in this study, the data collected by [39]
Test number φ shaft φ tip σ′v (kN/m2) L (m) A ­(m2) Qm (total) (kN)

1 33 38 255 24.5 0.131 2615 Low-Sill Structure, Old River

2 34 37.5 206 19.8 0.223 36.75 Low-Sill Structure, Old River
3 33 38 223 21.5 0.131 2164 Low-Sill Structure, Old River
4 33 37.5 210 20.2 0.1468 3042 Low-Sill Structure, Old River
5 33 37 206 19.9 0.1821 2856 Low-Sill Structure, Old River
6 38 41 138 11.6 0.209 3558 Lonesville, LA
7 38 40 164 13.7 0.209 3292 Lonesville, LA
8 38 40 196 16.5 0.209 3923 Lonesville, LA
9 35 37 158 16.2 0.105 1637 Arkansas River Project LD4
10 35 37 158 16.1 0.1644 2233 Arkansas River Project LD5
11 35 36.5 158 16.2 0.2109 2295 Arkansas River Project LD4
12 36.5 36.5 120 12.3 0.1654 1779 Arkansas River Project LD5
13 34 38 475 47.2 0.2917 5604 Low Arrow Lake, BC, Canada
14 34 34 38 3 0.1644 712 Ogeeches River, GA
15 35 35 72 6.1 0.1644 1735 Ogeeches River, GA
16 35 35 100 8.9 0.1644 2491 Ogeeches River, GA
17 36 36 131 12 0.1644 3158 Ogeeches River, GA
18 36 36 161 15 0.1644 3825 Ogeeches River, GA
19 35.5 36 163 15.2 0.1301 2695 Ogeeches River, GA
20 34 38 146 11.3 0.0316 1429 Tokyo, Japan
21 35.5 35.5 89 9.1 0.0864 658 St. Charles River, QC, Canada
22 35.5 35.5 119 12.2 0.0864 882 St. Charles River, QC, Canada
23 35.5 35.5 148 15.2 0.0864 1014 St. Charles River, QC, Canada
24 35.5 35.5 178 18.3 0.0864 1281 St. Charles River, QC, Canada
25 35.5 35.5 89 9.1 0.0799 655 St. Charles River, QC, Canada
26 35.5 35.5 119 12.2 0.0799 894 St. Charles River, QC, Canada
27 35.5 35.5 148 15.2 0.0799 1113 St. Charles River, QC, Canada
28 35.5 35.5 178 18.3 0.0799 1281 St. Charles River, QC, Canada
29 31 31 134 16 0.0613 480 Holemen Island, Drammen, Norway
30 31 31 134 16 0.0613 519 Holemen Island, Drammen, Norway
31 33 33 111 12.2 0.0061 75 Albysjon, Sweden
32 39 39.5 75 7 0.0999 2439 North Sea, The Netherlands
33 39 39.5 72 6.7 0.0999 3000 North Sea, The Netherlands
34 39 39.5 56 5.2 0.0999 1950 North Sea, The Netherlands
35 32 34 198 21 0.2313 3200 Zeebrugge, Belgium
36 37.5 40 301 29.9 0.3075 4733 West Seattle Freeway
37 37.5 39.5 258 25.6 0.3075 4021 West Seattle Freeway
38 33 35 169 18 0.6568 5000 Gadiz, Spain
39 28 39 213 16.8 0.1431 4670 Tacoma, WA
40 34 35 111 12.2 0.1143 854 Clyde VaHey-Glasgow, Scotland
41 32 35 241 23.3 0.1486 1628 Clyde VaHey-Glasgow, Scotland
42 34 35 92 9.1 0.1291 685 Clyde VaHey-Glasgow, Scotland
43 32 37 176 17.5 0.3855 3069 Biograd Yugoslavia
44 35 37 246 23.8 0.0729 1913 Missouri
45 35 37 183 17.7 0.0729 2313 Missouri
46 35 37 260 25.3 0.0729 1254 Connecticut
47 39 39.5 56 5.2 0.0999 1948 North Sea, The Netherlands
48 33 35.5 343 34.1 0.0325 1761 Cohasset, MN
49 34 36 319 31.7 0.0325 2180 Cohasset, MN
50 33 33 335 29.3 0.0557 3203 Kaohsiung, China

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Table 1  (continued)
Test number φ shaft φ tip σ′v (kN/m2) L (m) A ­(m2) Qm (total) (kN)

51 33 34 354 31.1 0.0557 3211 Kaohsiung, China

52 36 37 215 21.3 0.0409 1779 Winnemucca, NV
53 36 37 209 20.7 0.0827 1868 Winnemucca, NV
54 35 35 242 24.1 0.066 1779 Winnemucca, NV
55 36 37 209 207 0.0929 1913 Winnemucca, NV
56 35 35 166 16.5 0.0613 2100 Winnemucca, NV
57 35 35 178 17.7 0.0827 1509 Winnemucca, NV
58 35.5 37 228 21.9 0.066 922 Winnemucca, NV
59 35 35 178 17.7 0.0929 1779 Winnemucca, NV

Table 2  Several constructed Nodes in Network result

ANN models with different hidden
hidden nodes layers Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3 Iteration 4 Iteration 5 Average
RMSE RMSE RMSE RMSE RMSE RMSE
Train Test Train Test Train Test Train Test Train Test Train Test

1 0/086 0/090 0/077 0/062 0/080 0/059 0/099 0/061 0/085 0/090 0/085 0/072
2 0/088 0/085 0/074 0/066 0/095 0/051 0/091 0/060 0/082 0/090 0/086 0/070
3 0/085 0/088 0/073 0/065 0/086 0/056 0/084 0/069 0/078 0/084 0/081 0/072
4 0/081 0/078 0/078 0/060 0/080 0/058 0/080 0/068 0/080 0/088 0/080 0/070
5 0/079 0/074 0/079 0/066 0/082 0/05 0/082 0/07 0/076 0/085 0/080 0/069
6 0/078 0/071 0/080 0/067 0/085 0/052 0/076 0/062 0/077 0/087 0/079 0/068
7 0/077 0/072 0/076 0/068 0/084 0/053 0/080 0/061 0/072 0/086 0/078 0/068
8 0/076 0/075 0/075 0/066 0/081 0/051 0/081 0/059 0/073 0/090 0/077 0/068
9 0/075 0/070 0/070 0/067 0/082 0/046 0/078 0/057 0/070 0/092 0/075 0/066
10 0/077 0/078 0/081 0/070 0/084 0/051 0/080 0/060 0/072 0/099 0/079 0/072
11 0/076 0/071 0/072 0/069 0/083 0/049 0/080 0/059 0/073 0/094 0/077 0/068

Fig. 2  The obtained results of RMSE in order to determine Ndecade

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Engineering with Computers (2018) 34:347–356 353

was set to be 350. It means that if a value of Ndecade more var (y − y� )

than 350 (e.g., 400) is selected, there is no improvement in
network results and it only takes more time for modeling.
In the final stage of the hybrid ICA-ANN model, consider-
ing five datasets of training and testing, the suggested ANN
architecture (5 × 9 × 1) and the obtained ICA-ANN param-
eters, 5 ICA-ANN models were constructed and the best
one among them was chosen. More discussions concerning
the best ICA-ANN model for prediction of ultimate bearing
capacity of driven pile are given in the next section. It is
important to note that all AI models in the present research
were constructed using MatLab version 7.14.0.739 (Demuth
and Beale, 2000).
5 Model evaluation
Evaluation of the obtained results in predicting ultimate
bearing capacity of driven pile is discussed in this section. In
this regard, the selected performance indices are R2, RMSE
and variance account for (VAF) which their equations can
be seen as follows:
∑N � �2
y − y�
(2)
2 i=1
R =1−
∑N
i=1 (y − ỹ )2
[ ]
VAF = 1 − × 100 (3)
var (y)
√
N
√
√1 ∑
RMSE = √ (y − y� )2 (4)
N i=1
where y and y′ are the predicted and measured values,
respectively, ỹ is the mean of the y values and N is the
total number of data. The model will be excellent if R2 = 1,
VAF = 100 and RMSE = 0.
In this study, five ANN and five ICA-ANN were con-
structed using five different training and testing datasets.
The obtained results of the mentioned performance indices
for the developed models are presented in Table 3. As it
can be seen in this table, the obtained results in all of the
performance indices are very close to each other, so select-
ing the best predictive model among them seems to be dif-
ficult. To solve this problem, a ranking technique proposed
by Zorlu et al. [47] was used. According to the mentioned
technique, each performance index (VAF or RMSE or R2)
was ordered in its class and the best performance index was
assigned the highest rating. For example, values of 0.897,
0.885, 0.882, 0.891 and 0.888 were achieved for R2 of train-
ing datasets (1–5) of ANN models and values of 5, 2, 1, 4

Table 3  R2, VAF, and RMSE Method Stage Model R2 RMSE VAF Rating for R2 Rat- Rating Rank value
results of the developed models ing for for VAF
together with ranking values RMSE

ANN TR 1 0.897 0.075 89.493 5 4 5 14

2 0.885 0.070 88.212 2 5 2 9
3 0.882 0.082 88.196 1 2 1 4
4 0.891 0.078 89.068 4 3 4 11
5 0.888 0.070 88.368 3 5 3 11
TS 1 0.887 0.070 88.623 2 2 3 7
2 0.894 0.067 89.215 5 3 5 13
3 0.890 0.046 88.806 3 5 4 12
4 0.893 0.057 86.820 4 4 1 9
5 0.883 0.092 88.262 1 1 2 4
ICA-ANN TR 1 0.970 0.039 96.982 5 5 5 15
2 0.963 0.041 96.055 3 4 2 9
3 0.964 0.046 96.197 4 3 3 10
4 0.958 0.050 95.487 2 2 1 5
5 0.964 0.039 96.369 4 5 4 13
TS 1 0.961 0.042 96.083 1 2 1 4
2 0.969 0.038 96.844 4 3 4 11
3 0.968 0.025 96.840 3 5 3 11
4 0.962 0.035 96.120 2 4 2 8
5 0.974 0.051 97.369 5 1 5 11

TR training, TS testing

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Table 4  Obtained values of Method Model Total rank number 5 (with R2, RMSE and VAF values of 0.964, 0.039
total rank for the proposed and 96.369 for training and 0.974, 0.051 and 97.369 for test-
techniques ANN 1 21 ing, respectively) show the highest total rank values among
2 22 their groups (22 and 24, respectively). More details about the
3 16 simple ranking method can be found in the study conducted
4 20 by Zorlu et al. [47].
5 15 The relationships between the best models of ICA-ANN
ICA-ANN 1 19 and ANN in predicting ultimate bearing capacity of driven
2 20 pile and the measured ones for testing and training datasets
3 21 are displayed in Figs. 3 and 4, respectively. Results of the
4 13 developed ANN model based on R2 values were obtained
5 24 as 0.885 and 0.894 for training and testing datasets, respec-
tively, whereas values of 0.964 and 0.974 were achieved
for R2 of the ICA-ANN model, respectively. The obtained
and 3 were assigned for their ranks, respectively. Addition- results revealed that the proposed hybrid ICA-ANN model
ally, this process was repeated/applied for other performance can be introduced as a more accurate in predicting ultimate
indices and also for testing datasets. Afterwards, for each bearing capacity of driven pile. The results showed that by
predictive model, the ratings of the performance indices for developing an ICA-ANN model, performance prediction
both training and testing datasets were summed up (see total based on R2 can be improved from about 0.89 to about 0.97.
rank column in Table 4). According to the total rank results, Therefore, the developed ICA-ANN model can be used/
ANN dataset number 2 (with R2, RMSE and VAF values introduced as a new model with high accuracy level in esti-
of 0.885, 0.070 and 88.212 for training and 0.894, 0.067 mating ultimate bearing capacity of driven pile.
and 89.215 for testing, respectively) and ICA-ANN dataset

Fig. 3  Relationship between measured and predicted ultimate bearing capacity developing ANN model

Fig. 4  Relationship between measured and predicted ultimate bearing capacity developing ICA-ANN model

13
Engineering with Computers (2018) 34:347–356
6 Conclusions
In this paper, the effects of internal friction angle of soil
located in shaft (φ shaft), and tip (φ tip), effective vertical
stress at pile toe, pile length, and pile area on the perfor-
mance of driven pile in cohesionless soil were investigated.
Accordingly, an optimized ANN combined with ICA model
together with a pre-developed ANN model was introduced
and utilized to estimate the ultimate bearing capacity of
driven pile. For this purpose, a series of ANN and ICA-ANN
model were built. Comparison of measured and predicted
compressive capacity of a database comprising 59 static
driven pile load tests exhibits that the developed ICA-ANN
model yields a reasonably precise and accurate estimate of
driven pile bearing capacity in the cohesionless soil. Based
on the obtained results, the proposed ICA-ANN model was
able to accurately predict the output with the least error.
Results of the developed hybrid ICA-ANN model based on
R2 values were obtained as 0.964 and 0.974 for training and
testing datasets, respectively, whereas the values of 0.885
and 0.894 were achieved for R2 of the ANN model, respec-
tively. The proposed model is faster than the in situ method,
which means that this method can be used as the flexible
and reliable tools due to its fast speed and high accuracy;
therefore, precisely it can be applied to predict the in situ
driven pile in cohesionless soil.
Compliance with ethical standards
Conflict of interest The authors declare that there is no conflict of in-
terest in presenting this manuscript.
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