JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING RESEARCH, cilt.11, sa.1B, ss.101-110, 2023 (SCI-Expanded)
It is highly probable to encounter disputes in construction projects and construction disputes
are detrimental as they may lead to cost overruns and delays. Knowing the compensation
with some certainty can avoid parties from extending inconclusive claims. Decision support
systems can be helpful to understand the aspect of the compensation, if any compensation
can be acquired. Within this context, the primary objective of this research is to predict the
associated compensations in construction disputes by using machine learning (ML)
techniques on past project data so that in new projects, decision support can be provided with
some certainty via forecasts on the aspect of the compensation. To do this, a conceptual
model identifying the attributes affecting compensations was established based on an
extensive literature review. Using these attributes, data from real-world dispute cases were
collected. Insignificant attributes were eliminated via Chi-square tests to establish a simpler
classification model, which was experimented via alternative single and ensemble ML
techniques. The Naïve Bayes (NB) classifier generated the highest average classification
accuracy as 80.61% when One-vs-All (OvA) decomposition technique was utilized. The
conceptual model can guide construction professionals during dispute management decisionmaking and the promising results indicate that the classification model has the potential to identify compensations. This study can be used to mitigate disputes by preventing parties
from resorting to unpleasant and inconclusive resolution processes.