Optimizing the performance of machine learning algorithms for the condition assessment of utility timber poles

This study focuses on evaluating several machine learning algorithms for the condition assessment of utility timber poles. An efficient feature extraction technique combining Hilbert Huang transform (HHT) and wavelet packet transform (WPT) is adopted from the authors’ previous work and implemented to determine damage-sensitive features from vibration data related to five serviceable and eight unserviceable in-situ timber poles. Then, these features are pre-processed using correlation heat map analysis for feature selection. Principal component analysis (PCA) is adopted as the final step of pre-processing for reducing noise interference and enhancing classification accuracy. Afterwards, a feature matrix is formed, which is fed into the selected classifiers for pattern recognition. In addition, the information gain method is also implemented and compared against PCA to examine the effect of feature selection. Finally, selected classifiers are employed using those dominant features, and their performance is evaluated based on six parameters – accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, confusion matrix and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. It was found that choosing the best feature set related to the health state helps to improve the performance of the pattern recognition algorithms to a great extent.