Estimating the cost of capital projects: an empirical study of accuracy levels for municipal government projects
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
This paper highlights the findings of a study undertaken to assess the accuracy of cost estimates for construction projects at various levels of design maturity. Specifically, this paper addresses the accuracy of cost estimates for major types of municipal works including drainage, roadways, and building projects over a span of 3 years. Over 200 projects were statistically evaluated in the study at four levels of the design, namely, concept, preliminary, detailed, and award. Those estimates were then compared with actual incurred cost at project completion. In general, it was found that estimates are not as accurate as generally believed. It was also confirmed that cost estimates for rehabilitation work were less accurate than those for new work. In the absence of major changes to the design and estimation processes, more tempered accuracy limits were derived and proposed.Key words: estimating, budgeting, construction costs, variability in capital costs.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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