• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.45 no.3
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• pp.165-172
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• 2021

Breaking wave is one of the important design factors in the design of coastal and port structures as they are directly related to various physical phenomena occurring on the coast, such as onshore currents, sediment transport, shock wave pressure, and energy dissipation. Due to the inherent complexity of the breaking wave, many empirical formulas have been proposed to predict breaker indices such as wave breaking height and breaking depth using hydraulic models. However, the existing empirical equations for breaker indices mainly were proposed via statistical analysis of experimental data under the assumption of a specific equation. In this study, a new Munk-type empirical equation was proposed to predict the height of breaking waves based on a representative linear supervised machine learning technique with high predictive performance in various research fields related to regression or classification challenges. Although the newly proposed breaker height formula was a simple polynomial equation, its predictive performance was comparable to that of the currently available empirical formula.