• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.29 no.3C
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• pp.115-125
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• 2009

The preconsolidation pressure has been commonly determined by oedometer test. However, it can also be determined by insitu test, such as piezocone test with theoretical and(or) empirical correlations. Recently, Neural Network (NN) theory was applied and some models were proposed to estimate the preconsolidation pressure or OCR. It was already found that NN model can come over the site dependency and prediction accuracy is greatly improved when compared with present theoretical and empirical models. However, since the optimization process of synaptic weights of NN model is dependent on the initial synaptic weights, NN models which are trained with different initial weights can't avoid the variability on prediction result for new database even though they have same structure and use same transfer function. In this study, Committee Neural Network (CNN) model is proposed to improve the initial weight dependency of multi-layered neural network model on the prediction of preconsolidation pressure of soft clay from piezocone test result. Prediction results of CNN model are compared with those of conventional empirical and theoretical models and multi-layered neural network model, which has the optimized structure. It was found that even though the NN model has the optimized structure for given training data set, it still has the initial weight dependency, while the proposed CNN model can improve the initial weight dependency of the NN model and provide a consistent and precise inference result than existing NN models.