Model Development and Validation for Intelligent Data Collection for Lateral Spread Displacements

The geotechnical earthquake engineering community often adopts empirically derived models. Unfortunately, the community has not embraced the value of model validation, leaving practitioners with little information on the uncertainties present in a given model and the model’s predictive capability. In this study, we present a machine learning technique known as support vector regression (SVR) together with rigorous validation for modeling lateral spread displacements and outline how this information can be used for identifying gaps in the data set. We demonstrate the approach using the free face lateral displacement data. The results illustrate that the SVR has relatively better predictive capability than the commonly used empirical relationship derived using multilinear regression. Moreover, the analysis of the SVR model and its support vectors helps in identifying gaps in the data and defining the scope for future data collection.