Support Vector Machines Used for the Prediction of the Structural Conditions of Pipes in Bogota’s Sewer System

Objective: this paper focused on: (i) developing a deterioration model based on support vector machines (SVM) from its regression approach to separate the prediction of the structural condition of sewer pipes from a classification by grades and predict the scores obtained by failures found in CCTV inspections; and (ii) comparing the prediction results of the proposed model with the ones obtained by a deterioration model based on SVM classification tasks to explore the advantages and disadvantages of their predictions from different perspectives. Materials and methods: The sewer network of Bogota was the case study for this work in which a dataset consisting of the characteristics of 5031 pipes inspected by CCTV (obtained by GIS) was considered, as well as information on external variables (e.g., age, sewerage, and road type). Probability density functions (PDF) were used to convert the scores given by failures found in CCTV into structural grades. In addition, three techniques were used to evaluate the predictions from different perspectives: positive likelihood rate (PLR), performance curve and deviation analysis. Results: it was found that: (i) SVM-based deterioration model used from its regression approach is suitable to predict critical structural conditions of uninspected sewer pipes because this model showed a PLR value around 6.8 (the highest value among the predictions of all structural conditions for both models) and 74 % of successful predictions for the first 100 pipes with the highest probability of being in critical conditions; and (ii) SVM-based deterioration model used from its classification approach is suitable to predict other structural conditions because this model showed homogeneous PLR values for the prediction of all structural conditions (PLR values between 1.67 and 3.88) and deviation analysis results for all structural conditions are lower than the ones for the SVM-based model from its regression approach.