Application of Support Vector Machine Modeling for the Rapid Seismic Hazard Safety Evaluation of Existing Buildings

Abstract

The economic losses from earthquakes tend to hit the national economy considerably; therefore, models that are capable of estimating the vulnerability and losses of future earthquakes are highly consequential for emergency planners with the purpose of risk mitigation. This demands a mass prioritization filtering of structures to identify vulnerable buildings for retrofitting purposes. The application of advanced structural analysis on each building to study the earthquake response is impractical due to complex calculations, long computational time, and exorbitant cost. This exhibits the need for a fast, reliable, and rapid method, commonly known as Rapid Visual Screening (RVS). The method serves as a preliminary screening platform, using an optimum number of seismic parameters of the structure and predefined output damage states. In this study, the efficacy of the Machine Learning (ML) application in damage prediction through a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model as the damage classification technique has been investigated. The developed model was trained and examined based on damage data from the 1999 Düzce Earthquake in Turkey, where the building’s data consists of 22 performance modifiers that have been implemented with supervised machine learning.