Machine learning-based prediction of wind forces on CAARC standard tall buildings

Although machine learning (ML) techniques have been widely used in various fields of engineering practice, their applications in the field of wind engineering are still at the initial stage. In order to evaluate the feasibility of machine learning algorithms for prediction of wind loads on high-rise buildings, this study took the exposure category type, wind direction and the height of local wind force as the input features and adopted four different machine learning algorithms including k-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), gradient boosting regression tree (GBRT) and extreme gradient (XG) boosting to predict wind force coefficients of CAARC standard tall building model. All the hyper-parameters of four ML algorithms are optimized by tree-structured Parzen estimator (TPE). The result shows that mean drag force coefficients and RMS lift force coefficients can be well predicted by the GBRT algorithm model while the RMS drag force coefficients can be forecasted preferably by the XG boosting algorithm model. The proposed machine learning based algorithms for wind loads prediction can be an alternative of traditional wind tunnel tests and computational fluid dynamic simulations.