Discussion of 'Estimation of Clear-Water Local Scour at Pile Groups Using Genetic Expression Programming and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines' by S. M. Bateni, H. R. Vosoughifar, B. Truce, and D. S. Jeng

摘要

The paper under discussion stated in the "Data" subsection that the authors have compiled 347 pile group (PG) scour data points from 20 sources, and the sources are cited in that section. However, the database size is inconsistent. From the 20 sources cited in the original paper, by excluding Sheppard (2003) and Moreno et al. (2016), the remaining 18 sources have 310 data points, which can be verified by checking the database compilation of Amini Baghbadorani et al. (2017) and its supplementary spreadsheet. Sheppard (2003) presents 6 PG data points, 3 of which are shared with Smith (1999), and Moreno et al. (2016) presents 1 PG data point. Consequently, the 20 sources cited in the original paper have 317 data points, which is less than 347 points mentioned in their work. These problems would have been avoided if the authors had cited the database of Amini Baghbadorani et al. (2017), which contains 365 pile group scour data.