Comparing the utility of decision trees and support vector machines when planning inspections of linear sewer infrastructure
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Closed-circuit television inspection technology is traditionally used to identify aging sewer pipes requiring rehabilitation. While these inspections provide essential information on the condition of pipes hidden from day-to-day view, they are expensive and often limited to small portions of an entire sewer system. Municipalities may benefit from utilizing predictive analytics to leverage existing inspection datasets so that reliable predictions of condition are available for pipes that have not yet been inspected. The predictive capabilities of data mining systems, namely support vector machines (SVMs) and decision tree classifiers, are demonstrated using a case study of sanitary sewer pipe inspection data collected by the municipality of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. The modeling algorithms are implemented using open-source software and are tuned to counteract the negative impact on predictive performance resulting from class imbalance common within pipe inspection datasets. The decision tree classifier outperforms SVM for this classification task – achieving an acceptable area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.77 and an overall accuracy of 76% on a stratified test set. Although predicting individual pipe condition is a notoriously difficult task, decision trees are found to be a useful screening tool for planning future inspection-related activities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it