A Comparative Evaluation of Machine Learning Algorithms for the Prediction of R/C Buildings' Seismic Damage

TL;DR

This study compares various machine learning algorithms for predicting seismic damage in R/C buildings, highlighting LightGBM's superior performance in accuracy and stability, aiding civil protection decision-making.

Contribution

It provides an extensive evaluation of multiple machine learning methods for seismic damage prediction, demonstrating LightGBM's effectiveness over other algorithms.

Findings

LightGBM shows high prediction accuracy and stability.

Machine learning methods outperform traditional statistical approaches.

The dataset includes 90 buildings and 65 earthquakes for training.

Abstract

Seismic assessment of buildings and determination of their structural damage is at the forefront of modern scientific research. Since now, several researchers have proposed a number of procedures, in an attempt to estimate the damage response of the buildings subjected to strong ground motions, without conducting time-consuming analyses. These procedures, e.g. construction of fragility curves, usually utilize methods based on the application of statistical theory. In the last decades, the increase of the computers' power has led to the development of modern soft computing methods based on the adoption of Machine Learning algorithms. The present paper attempts an extensive comparative evaluation of the capability of various Machine Learning methods to adequately predict the seismic response of R/C buildings. The training dataset is created by means of Nonlinear Time History Analyses of 90 3D R/C buildings with three different masonry infills' distributions, which are subjected to 65 earthquakes. The seismic damage is expressed in terms of the Maximum Interstory Drift Ratio. A large-scale comparison study is utilized by the most efficient Machine Learning algorithms. The experimentation shows that the LightGBM approach produces training stability, high overall performance and a remarkable coefficient of determination to estimate the ability to predict the buildings' damage response. Due to the extremely urgent issue, civil protection mechanisms need to incorporate in their technological systems scientific methodologies and appropriate technical or modeling tools such as the proposed one, which can offer valuable assistance in making optimal decisions.