A novel double-hybrid learning method for modal frequency-based damage assessment of bridge structures under different environmental variation patterns

Abstract

Monitoring of modal frequencies under an unsupervised learning framework is a practical strategy for damage assessment of civil structures, especially bridges. However, the key challenge is related to high sensitivity of modal frequencies to environmental and/or operational changes that may lead to economic and safety losses. The other challenge pertains to different environmental and/or operational variation patterns in modal frequencies due to differences in structural types, materials, and applications, measurement periods in terms of short and/or long monitoring programs, geographical locations of structures, weather conditions, and influences of single or multiple environmental and/or operational factors, which may cause barriers to employing state-of-the-art unsupervised learning approaches. To cope with these issues, this paper proposes a novel double-hybrid learning technique in an unsupervised manner. It contains two stages of data partitioning and anomaly detection, both of which comprise two hybrid algorithms. For the first stage, an improved hybrid clustering method based on a coupling of shared nearest neighbor searching and density peaks clustering is proposed to prepare local information for anomaly detection with the focus on mitigating environmental and/or operational effects. For the second stage, this paper proposes an innovative non-parametric hybrid anomaly detector based on local outlier factor. In both stages, the number of nearest neighbors is the key hyperparameter that is automatically determined by leveraging a self-adaptive neighbor searching algorithm. Modal frequencies of two full-scale bridges are utilized to validate the proposed technique with several comparisons. Results indicate that this technique is able to successfully eliminate different environmental and/or operational variations and correctly detect damage.