Learnable quantile polynomial chaos expansion: An uncertainty quantification method for interval reliability analysis

Abstract

Various uncertainties like random input and data noise in aerospace engineering affect flight vehicle safety, making uncertainty quantification important for improving system reliability. Polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) is a versatile method for quantifying stochastic systems’ uncertainty caused by random input, while it cannot quantify data uncertainty caused by noise. To solve this problem, a novel uncertainty quantification method, learnable quantile PCE (LQPCE), is proposed for interval reliability analysis. Unlike the traditional PCE, the multi-dimensional orthonormal basis is constructed for combination input rather than only random variables, and the expansion coefficients are parameterized to learnable weights, ensuring the LQPCE model can capture data noise’s features. The LQPCE Pinball loss function is constructed to learn parameterized expansion coefficients by quantile level iterative sampling, achieving accurate prediction and data uncertainty quantification. The quantified data uncertainty is used for interval reliability analysis, calculating more reliable results about the influence of input uncertainty on stochastic systems’ reliability. Three numerical examples and one engineering application validate the LQPCE method’s effectiveness. The results show that the LQPCE method can quantify data uncertainty accurately and obtain credible interval reliability.