Discontinuity Predictions of Porosity and Hydraulic Conductivity Based on Electrical Resistivity in Slopes through Deep Learning Algorithms

Abstract

Electrical resistivity is used to obtain various types of information for soil strata. Hence, the prediction of electrical resistivity is helpful to predict the future behavior of soil. The objective of this study is to apply deep learning algorithms, including deep neural network (DNN), long-short term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU), to determine the reliability of electrical resistivity predictions to find the discontinuity of porosity and hydraulic conductivity. New DNN-based algorithms, i.e., LSTM-DNN and GRU-DNN, are also applied in this study. The electrical resistivity values are obtained using 101 electrodes installed at 2 m intervals on a mountaintop, and a Wenner array is selected to simplify the electrode installation and measurement. A total of 1650 electrical resistivity values are obtained for one measurement considering the electrode spacing, and accumulated data measured for 15 months are used in the deep learning analysis. A constant ratio of 6:2:2 among the training, validation, and test data, respectively, is used for the measured electrical resistivity, and the hyperparameters in each algorithm are moderated to improve the reliability. Based on the deep learning model results, the distributions of porosity and hydraulic conductivity are deduced, and an average depth of 25 m is estimated for the discontinuity depth. This paper shows that the deep learning technique is well used to predict electrical resistivity, porosity, hydraulic conductivity, and discontinuity depth.