Modeling Hydration Kinetics of the Portland-Cement-Based Cementitious Systems with Mortar Blends by Non-Assumptive Projection Pursuit Regression

Highlights: • The hydration heat model of cementitious system with mortar blend was built • New ridge functions and iterative optimization improved the performance of model • The proposed model is a non-assumptive method, with favorable prediction accuracy • The models simulated the hydration process of cementitious system with mortar blend The non-assumptive projection pursuit regression (NA-PPR) method, which is an exploratory data analysis method for analyzing high-dimensional data, was applied to predict the hydration heat of Portland-cement-based cementitious systems with mortar blends. The hydration mechanisms of cementitious systems were investigated by the Krstulovic–Dabic model, which was based on the proposed NA-PPR model of hydration heat. The new ridge functions and three-layer-grouping iterative optimization method were used to develop the NA-PPR model to improve the performance and address the non-uniqueness problem of parameter selection and subjective assumptions. It was shown that the proposed NA-PPR model is a promising non-assumptive method, with favorable prediction accuracy and a visible functional expression. Moreover, the Krstulovic–Dabic model combined with the NA-PPR model was able to well simulate the hydration process of the Portland-cement-based cementitious materials systems with mortar blends.