Sparse Bayesian machine learning for the interpretable identification of nonlinear structural dynamics: Towards the experimental data-driven discovery of a quasi zero stiffness device

Abstract

Data-driven discovery of governing laws for complex nonlinear structural dynamic systems remains a challenging issue of paramount importance. This work addresses the above issue by leveraging the available noisy data and integrating sparse Bayesian machine learning (ML) techniques to discover the governing equations. The problem of discovery is re-cast as the automatic relevance determination of models (model selection) from the library of potential candidate basis terms and their coefficients are determined (parameter identification) using sparse Bayesian linear regression. Two sparsity promoting ML algorithms based on relevance vector machines have been employed. Both these approaches use Bayesian statistics and quantify the uncertainty associated with the model predictions. Results from four representative numerical examples of nonlinear structural dynamics illustrate excellent performance of both proposed approaches. The results have been validated with the true governing equations and time response data. Comparison has also been made with a recent and popular sparse discovery approach. Finally, the proposed framework is applied to real datasets that were generated from an in-house designed experimental setup of a quasi zero stiffness device and good performance has been observed.