Seismic response prediction of a damped structure based on data-driven machine learning methods

Damping technology has been widely used because of its good vibration control effect. However, due to the strong nonlinearity of the added dampers, accurately predicting the seismic response of damped structures remains a challenge. This study investigates the application of interpretable machine learning (ML)-based and deep learning-based approaches to the prediction of the maximum inter-storey displacement of a damped structure. A comprehensive database consisting of 13,855 structural responses to ground motions was collected. Seven traditional interpretable ML algorithms including random forest and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), a convolutional neural network based on large receptive field, and seismic wave transformer (SWT) model based on a transformer network were developed. The predictions show that the error of the SWT based on unsupervised feature extraction is reduced by 50.90% compared with that of the optimal XGBoost in ensemble learning. Although the SWT has the highest global accuracy, XGBoost is found to have a smaller error when the structure is in a linear state with peak ground acceleration as partition index, so an aggregation model (AM)-based structural response prediction method was also proposed. The accuracy of the AM improved by 27.95% compared with that of the SWT. In contrast with other ML models, the proposed AM is more advantageous in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy.