Knowledge discovery in residential construction project cost data

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.