Boussabaine, A H and Elhag, T M S (1999) Knowledge discovery in residential construction project cost data. In: Hughes, W (ed.) Proceedings of 15th Annual ARCOM Conference, 15-17 September 1999, Liverpool, UK.
Abstract
Clients, designers, consultants and contractors are required to make business decisions. Frequently the decision must be based on supporting information that is uncertain, incomplete, or expressed in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. Estimation of construction costs always includes uncertainty, which is caused by the limited ability of decision makers to recognize the association between different cost attributes. Knowledge discovery is a recent development in the field of database exploration. A powerful and well-investigated topic is the discovery of association rules. This paper examines the association between the cost of projects and cost attributes. The paper reports on relationships related to a particular event occurring and examines the rules, which state that, for example, when a particular cost attribute is present then the cost of construction projects increases or decreases in a certain percentage of cases. The association between the cost attributes will also be described. This provides a means to examine many possible relationships between cost attributes and final projects cost prior to any design or contractual decisions.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | cost; cost attributes; construction cost; knowledge; interdependency; residential projects |
| Index terms: | construction cost, exploration, project cost, estimation, residential construction, designer, residential project, construction project, database |
| Subjects: | data management, economics, economic development, production management, financial and cost management, environmental resource management, profession, construction integration |
| Topics: | Project Management, Urban Studies, Business Strategy, Cost Management, Digital Applications, Roles and Professions, Sustainability |
| Descriptive scope: | 2 PC |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here