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Abstract: For transportation infrastructure, one of the greatest challenges today is to keep large-scale transportation networks, such as
railway networks, operational under all conditions. This task becomes even more difficult to accomplish if one takes into account budget
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limitations for maintenance and repair works. This paper presents a tool aimed at helping in management tasks related to maintenance and
repair work for a particular element of this infrastructure, the slopes. The highly flexible learning capabilities of artificial neural networks
(ANNs) and support vector machines (SVMs) were applied in the development of a tool able to identify the stability condition of rock and soil
cutting slopes, keeping in mind the use of information usually collected during routine inspection activities (visual information) to feed the
models. This task was addressed following two different strategies: nominal classification and regression. Moreover, to overcome the problem
of imbalanced data, three training sampling approaches were explored: no resampling, synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE),
and oversampling. The achieved results are presented and discussed, comparing the performance of ANN and SVM algorithms as well as the
effect of the sampling approaches. A comparison between nominal classification and regression strategies for both rock and soil cutting slopes
is also carried out, highlighting the different performance observed in the study of the two different types of slope. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)
CP.1943-5487.0000739. © 2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
Introduction and Background systems were developed based on particular case studies or using
small databases. Furthermore, another aspect that can limit their
A key element in modern society is its transportation system. Every applicability is related with the information required to feed them,
developed country undergoing development has invested and keeps such as data taken from complex tests or from expensive monitor-
investing to build a safe and functional transportation network. ing systems.
Nowadays, the main concern, particularly for developed countries Some approaches found in the literature for slope failure detec-
that already have a very complete transportation network, is to keep tion are identified later. Pourkhosravani and Kalantari (2011) sum-
such networks operational under all conditions. However, because marize the current methods for slope stability evaluation, which
of network extension and increased budget constraints, such a task were grouped into limit equilibrium (LE) methods, numerical
is often difficult to accomplish. analysis methods, artificial neural networks, and limit analysis
In order to optimize the available budget it is important to have a methods. There are also approaches based on finite-element meth-
set of tools to help decision makers to take the best decisions. In the ods (Suchomel et al. 2010), reliability analysis (Sivakumar Babu
framework of transportation networks, in particular for a railway, and Murthy 2005; Husein Malkawi et al. 2000), as well as some
slopes are perhaps the element for which their failure can have the methods making use of soft computing algorithms (Gavin and Xue
strongest impact at several levels. Therefore, it is important to de- 2009; Cheng and Hoang 2016; Ahangar-Asr et al. 2010; Lu and
velop ways to identify potential problems before they result in Rosenbaum 2003; Sakellariou and Ferentinou 2005; Cheng
failures. et al. 2012b; Yao et al. 2008; Kang et al. 2015, 2016a, b, 2017;
Although there are some models and systems to detect slope Kang and Li 2016; Das et al. 2011; Suman et al. 2016). More re-
failures, most of them were developed for natural slopes, presenting cently, a new flexible statistical system was proposed by Pinheiro
some constraints when applied to engineered (human-made) et al. (2015), based on the assessment of different factors that affect
slopes. They have limited applicability because most of the existing the behavior of a given slope. By weighting the different factors, a
1
final indicator of the slope stability condition is calculated. For a
Researcher, Institute for Sustainability and Innovation in Structural En- complete and full understanding of the slope quality index (SQI)
gineering, ALGORITMI Research Center, School of Engineering, Univ. of
system, readers are advised to read Pinheiro et al. (2015).
Minho, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal (corresponding author). ORCID:
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6824-5221. E-mail: jtinoco@civil.uminho.pt
As already mentioned, the main limitations of most approaches
2
Associate Professor, ALGORITMI Research Centre, School of so far proposed are related with their applicability domain or
Engineering, Univ. of Minho, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal. E-mail: dependency on information that is difficult to obtain. Indeed, the
pcortez@dsi.uminho.pt prediction of whether a slope will fail or not is a multivariable prob-
3
Associate Professor, Dept. of Information Systems, ALGORITMI lem characterized by high dimensionality.
Research Center, Univ. of Minho, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal. E-mail: Aiming to overcome this limitation, in this work the authors take
pcortez@dsi.uminho.pt advantage of the learning capabilities of flexible soft computing
4
Full Professor, School of Engineering and Computing Sciences, Univ. algorithms, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) and support
of Durham, Durham DH1 3LE, U.K. E-mail: d.g.toll@durham.ac.uk
vector machines (SVMs), which can model complex nonlinear
Note. This manuscript was submitted on December 16, 2016; approved
on August 18, 2017; published online on December 22, 2017. Discussion mappings. These soft computing algorithms were used to fit a large
period open until May 22, 2018; separate discussions must be submitted for database of rock and soil cutting slopes in order to predict the sta-
individual papers. This paper is part of the Journal of Computing in Civil bility condition of a given slope according to a predefined classi-
Engineering, © ASCE, ISSN 0887-3801. fication scale based on four levels (classes). One of the underlying
locate the available funds to assets in the priority according to its • End Mileage;
stability condition. • End Northing;
This paper is organized as follows. The “Data Characterization” • Exp Above Slope;
section characterizes the databases used to train the models. Then, • Exp Toe Slope;
after a brief description of the methodologies applied to identify • Groundwater Seepage;
the stability condition of rock and soil cutting slopes in the • Lower Slope (LS);
“Methodology” section, the main results are summarized and dis- • LS Actual Angle;
cussed in section “Results.” Finally, some final observations are • LS Actual Height;
presented in the “Discussion” section, comparing the achieved re- • LS Actual Hyp (Hyp = Hypotenuse);
sults for both rock and soil cutting slope studies. • LS Angle;
• LS Length;
• Material Cess;
Data Characterization • Northing;
• Operational Route;
As previously mentioned, in this work two models are proposed to • Pot Failure On Slope;
identify the stability condition, from this point referred to as the • Previous Failure On Face;
earthwork hazard category [EHC (Power et al. 2016)], of rock • Remedial Work Present;
and soil cutting slopes respectively using data modeling tools. • Rock Mass lt Moderate Strength;
The EHC system comprises four classes (A, B, C, and D) in • Rock Strength;
which A represents a good stability condition and D a bad stability • Rock Type;
condition. In other words, the expected probability of failure is • Rock Weathering;
higher for Class D and lower for Class A. To fit the models for • Rock Slope (RS) Actual Angle;
EHC prediction, two databases were compiled containing informa- • RS Actual Height;
tion collected during routine inspections and complemented with • RS Actual Hyp;
geometric, geological, and geographic data of each slope. Both da-
tabases were gathered by Network Rail workers and are concerned
with the railway network of the United Kingdom. For each slope a 6297
class of the EHC system was defined by the Network Rail engi- Slope type:
6000 Rock Cuttings
neers based on their experience/algorithm (Power et al. 2016),
Soil Cuttings
which will be assumed as a proxy for the real stability condition
5124
of the slope for the year 2015.
Both databases contain a significant number of records. The
rock slopes database comprises 5,945 records, whereas the soil cut-
Number of records
The problem of EHC prediction of rock and soil cutting slopes class were properly captured by the model. In other words,
was initially approached following a nominal classification strat- the recall of a certain class is given by
egy. However, aiming to improve the model’s performance, the TruePositives
problem was also addressed following a regression strategy, adopt- ð2Þ
TruePositives þ FalseNegatives
ing a regression scale in which A ¼ 1, B ¼ 2, C ¼ 4, and D ¼ 10.
Moreover, in order to minimize the effect of the imbalanced data On the other hand, the precision measures the correctness of the
(Fig. 1), oversampling (Ling and Li 1998) and SMOTE (Chawla model when it predicts a certain class. More specifically, the pre-
et al. 2002) approaches were applied over the training data before cision of a certain class is given by
fitting the models. When approaching imbalanced classification TruePositives
tasks, in which there is at least one target class label with a smaller ð3Þ
TruePositives þ FalsePositives
number of training samples when compared with other target class
labels, the simple use of a soft computing training algorithm will The F1-score was also calculated, which represents a trade-off
lead to data-driven models with better prediction accuracies for the between the recall and precision of a class. The F1-score corre-
majority classes and worse classification accuracies for the minor- sponds to the harmonic mean of precision and recall, according
ity classes. Thus, techniques that adjust the training data in order to to the following expression:
balance the output class labels, such as oversampling and SMOTE, precision · recall
are commonly used with imbalanced data sets. In particular, over- 2· ð4Þ
precision þ recall
sampling is a simple technique that randomly adds samples (with
repetition) of the minority classes to the training data, such that the For all four metrics, the higher the value, the better are the
final training set is balanced. SMOTE is a more sophisticated tech- predictions. The AUS values can be negative (if on average, the
nique that creates “new data” by looking at nearest neighbors to predictions lead to a cost), and the ideal predictor will have an
establish a neighborhood and then sampling from within that neigh- AUS of 1. The other metrics, recall, precision, and F1-score,
borhood. It operates on the assumption that the original data is sim- can range from 0 to 100%.
ilar because of proximity. More recently, Torgo et al. (2015) The generalization capacity of the models was accessed through a
adapted the SMOTE method for regression tasks. fivefold cross-validation approach under 20 runs (Hastie et al. 2009).
All experiments were conducted using the R statistical environ- This means that each modeling setup is trained 5 × 20 ¼ 100 times.
ment (R Core Team 2009) and supported through the rminer pack- Also, the four prediction metrics are always computed on test unseen
age (Cortez 2010), which facilitates the implementation of ANN data (as provided by the fivefold validation procedure).
and SVM algorithms, as well as different validation approaches
such as cross-validation.
Results
Models Evaluation This section summarizes the main results achieved in EHC predic-
tion of rock and soil cutting slopes through the application of soft
The distinct data-driven models will be evaluated and compared computing techniques. As described earlier, two different soft com-
using four classification metrics: average utility core (AUS), recall, puting algorithms (ANN and SVM) were applied for EHC predic-
precision, and F1-score. tion under two distinct modeling strategies: nominal classification
A cost-benefit matrix (CBM) is used to compute the AUS (Baía and regression. Moreover, in order to overcome the problem of im-
and Torgo 2015), which averages all individual predictions in terms balanced data, three training sampling approaches were explored:
of their expected cost or benefit, thus leading to a metric that is Normal (no resampling), OVERed (oversampling) and SMOTEd
more directly related to a particular real-world domain. In this (SMOTE). In case of regression, two sampling approaches were
work, it was set a CBM that reflects the EHC classification system compared: Normal (no resampling) and SMOTEd (SMOTE for re-
and the characteristics of its slope identification tasks (Table 1). gression). The authors note that the different sampling approaches
The assumption behind the adopted CBM was to penalize every were applied only to training data, used to fit the data-driven mod-
misclassification but using different weights according to the els, and the test data (as provided by the fivefold procedure) were
“distance” of the misclassification and putting larger penalties to kept without any change.
bad stability conditions (the ones that are more important to be cor-
rectly classified). For example, if a particular soil slope was iden-
Rock Slopes: EHC Prediction
tified as Class A (true condition), then the benefit is þ1 if the model
predicts the same class. For the same sample, the cost is −4 if the Concerning the study of rock slopes, Table 2 summarizes AUS,
model predicts a Class C, and it doubles to −8 if the prediction is recall, precision, and F1-score of all fitted models for EHC
prediction of rock slopes, according to a nominal classification present a high performance in Class A identification of rock
and regression strategies as well as using SMOTE and oversam- slopes (F1-score higher than 93%). However, for Class C
pling approaches. For a better analysis and model comparison, and particularly for Class D, the models have great difficulty
Fig. 2 compares recall, precision, and F1-score metrics of all in predicting these classes correctly. Indeed, and using F1-score
models in EHC prediction following a nominal classification as reference, the best performance in identification of slopes of
strategy. From its analysis it was observed that all models Class D is lower than 14%, which was achieved by the ANN
ANN SVM
100 98.5 98.01 97.39 99.78 97.24
96.23 94.66 95.44 93.01 93.95 94.42
88.1 90.21 91.63 91.01 92.92
85.53 86.95
75
50
A
25
0
100
82.64
75 67.6 67.96
62.83
52.95 50.93 48.95 51.35
B
50 49.06 48.57
43.74
47.25
38.36 41.27 39.79
33.08
25
12.82
Metric value
7.14
0
100
75
50
C
42.95
36.58 39.58 39.22
33.47 36.27 34.36
26.14 26.84 30.49
25 20.4
11.2
6.44 3.9
2.07 0
0
100
75
50
D
Fig. 2. Models comparison based on recall, precision, and F1-score, according to a nominal classification strategy in EHC prediction of rock slopes
ANN SVM
100 95.01 98.07 96.32 99.4
93.7 94.35 91.62 92.56 94.4
85.97 86.86
77.13
75
A
50
25
0
100 93.15
75 68.37
49.83
B
50 48.3 45.28 46.33 48.02
44.57
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41.38 42.59
33.85
27.61
25
Metric value
0
100
75
54.17
50 48.33
C
45.84
41.77 40.19 40.96 38.34
32.95
25 18.08
11.12
0.3 0.6
0
100
75
D
50
35.56
30.49
25
4.32 6.09 7.7
3.38 0 0
0
Recall Precision F1-score Recall Precision F1-score
Metric
Fig. 3. Models comparison based on recall, precision, and F1-score, according to a regression strategy in EHC prediction of rock slopes
algorithm after balancing the database through the SMOTE Approach: Normal SMOTEd OVERed
approach.
Analyzing the influence of the SMOTE and oversampling ap- Classification Regression
proaches, a slight increase of model performance is observed for 0.4 0.4
0.4 0.38
Class C and D predictions. In other words, the use of a balancing
approach allows an improvement of the model performance for the
minority classes. 0.32
Fig. 3 compares model performance based on recall, precision, 0.3 0.3
and F1-score metrics following a regression strategy. Also here, a 0.27
0.26
high performance was achieved for Classes A and B identification
0.23
of rock slopes, but a very low response is observed for Class D.
AUS
1.00 1.00
0.75 0.75
Frequency
Frequency
A A
0.50 B 0.50 B
C C
D D
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0.25 0.25
0.00 0.00
A B C D A B C D
(a) EHC Experimental (b) EHC Experimental
Fig. 5. Models performance comparison according to a nominal classification strategy in EHC prediction of rock slopes: (a) ANN model following an
OVERed approach; (b) SVM model following a SMOTEd approach
classification and regression strategies, respectively. From its These results show that a deeper data analysis is required. For
analysis, we can observe that rock slopes of Class A are almost example, the number of variables taken as model attributes might
correctly identified. However, for Classes C and D, for which be too high. To check if a better generalization could be achieved
the expected probability of failure is higher, models show very using the most relevant inputs, the authors performed additional
great difficulty in identifying these classes accurately. From experimentation using a fast feature selection method that is based
the analysis in Fig. 5(a), only 25% of rock slopes classified on a sensitive analysis (Cortez and Embrechts 2013), which allows
as Class D were correctly identified, which represents a poor measurement of the relative importance of each input of a classi-
performance. fication or regression method. Taken as reference the ANN model
1.00 1.00
0.75 0.75
EHC Predicted
Frequency
Frequency
EHC Predicted
A
A
0.50 B 0.50
B
C
C
D
0.25 0.25
0.00 0.00
A B C D A B C D
(a) EHC Experimental (b) EHC Experimental
Fig. 6. Models performance comparison according to a regression strategy in EHC prediction of rock slopes: (a) ANN model with no resampling;
(b) SVM model following a SMOTEd approach
Upper Slope 1.2 relevant inputs). The results from Table 3 show that the feature
RS Length 1 selection tends to present a lower performance, with lower
End Northing 0.8 F1-score values.
Drainage Problems 0.6
Cess Stand Off 0.6
LS Angle
Soil Cutting Slopes: EHC Prediction
0.6
0 5 10 15 For the study of soil cutting slopes, Table 4 shows and compares
Relative Importance (%) models performance in EHC prediction based on the metrics AUS,
recall, precision, and F1-score, following the nominal classification
Fig. 7. Relative importance bar plot of the 20 most relevant vari- and regression strategies as well as the SMOTE and oversampling
ables according to ANN model with OVERed and following approaches. Figs. 8 and 9 allow a better assessment of all models
a nominal classification strategy in EHC prediction of rock for EHC prediction of soil cutting slopes, comparing their perfor-
slopes mance based on recall, precision, and F1-score for each EHC class.
Following a nominal classification strategy, Fig. 8 shows that soil
Table 3. Difference between F1-Score Values of the Full Input Model (with 65 or 51 Variables, Respectively) with a Feature Selection Model That Included
the Most Relevant Inputs according to a Sensitivity Analysis Procedure
Rock slopes Soil cutting slopes
Strategy Model Approach A B C D A B C D
Classification ANN Normal 1.53 13.9 19.27 3.72 7.11 16.00 18.81 15.09
SMOTEd 2.38 7.51 3.15 5.26 9.15 12.25 23.60 19.04
OVERed 3.28 12.96 10.31 6.30 8.82 20.31 16.31 21.00
SVM Normal 0.90 13.34 7.31 N/A 7.44 15.26 28.56 3.49
SMOTEd 90.87 29.78 N/A N/A 6.23 13.78 −1.12 13.17
OVERed 0.91 −25.02 N/A N/A −0.49 −17.01 −8.51 −2.21
Regression ANN Normal 1.23 −2.20 14.46 5.81 10.00 9.40 17.25 25.82
SMOTEd 1.24 1.47 9.66 N/A 10.38 10.90 17.44 28.29
SVM Normal 0.74 3.65 0.18 N/A 6.49 14.74 1.69 N/A
SMOTEd −1.70 −0.56 2.34 N/A 0.72 11.79 17.27 N/A
ANN SVM
91.68 91.13 94.79 91.5
90.36 87.23 88.77 85.94 90.33 86.85 88.56
86.35
80.87 82.05 81.61
75.87
75 73.65
63.25
50
A
25
79.27
75
64.01 66.59 66.82
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B
33.6
25 24.74
Metric value
75
63.77 62.98
59.21 57.71
55.91 53.53
51.48 49.77 51.53 48.62
50 45.61 46.07
C
42.88
34.11 34.05
25 24.96
1.54 3.01
0
75
62.96
56.78
50
D
42.57
38.41 35.91
33.71 31.33 30.81
24.88 27.53
25 21.63 21.67 22.31
14.53
2.25 1.32 4.09 2.59
0
Recall Precision F1-score Recall Precision F1-score
Metric
Fig. 8. Model comparison based on recall, precision, and F1-score, according to a nominal classification strategy in EHC prediction of soil cutting
slopes
cutting slopes of Class A can be correctly identified, particularly regression strategies, it can be seen that the models’ perfor-
by the ANN model, with or without sampling. Also for Classes mances are indeed very interesting. Following a nominal classi-
B and C a promising performance is observed, with an F1-score fication strategy and sampling the database with the SMOTE
around 55%, in particular by the ANN algorithm. Concerning approach, the ANN algorithm is able to predict correctly approx-
Class D, although an F1-score lower than 36% was achieved, imately 57% of soil cutting slopes of Class D, which represents a
the obtained value for recall metric of approximately 57% shows very interesting performance if taken into account that this is the
a promising performance for Class D prediction according to minority class. For Class C, approximately 40% of the records
ANN algorithm. are correctly predicted. Moreover, when not predicted as Class C,
Following a regression strategy, the achieved results are they are classified as belonging to the closest class, that is, Classes
very similar to those obtained from a nominal classification B or D. This type of misclassification is also observed for Classes
strategy. The main differences are related with the effect of the A, B, and D, which can be interpreted as an advantage. Concern-
sampling approaches, which is not so relevant following a re- ing Classes A and B, the ANN model was also able to identify it
gression strategy, particularly for the minority classes. Compar- very accurately.
ing ANN and SVM algorithms, ANN works better (as observed Similarly to what has been done for rock slopes, also for soil
previously), particularly in the prediction of Classes C and D cutting slopes all models were retrained considering only 25%
slopes. of the most relevant variables (12 inputs) taken as reference the
Comparing both strategies (nominal classification and regres- ANN model following a SMOTEd approach and according to
sion), as illustrated in Fig. 10 which uses AUS as a comparison nominal classification strategy, which achieved the overall best
metric, the SVM algorithm was not able to learn properly EHC performance in EHC prediction of soil cutting slopes (Fig. 12).
prediction of soil cutting slopes. However, when looking to Fig. 11, As shown in Table 3, better performance is also achieved when
which shows the relation between observed and predicted EHC val- considering all 51 inputs when compared with the usage of the
ues according to the best fits, following nominal classification and 12 most relevant inputs.
ANN SVM
89.32 91.07 93.43
87.41 85.34 87.74 87.57 87.28 83.66 87.21
77.56
75 66.3
50
A
25
82.02 85.38
75 64.47 68.68
61 62.3 64.31
57.88 57 59.63
52.89
50
B
45.81
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25
Metric value
75 66.37
59.2 60.23 60
52.98 53.75
50 47.94 48.53
C
44.76
33.77
24.89
25 15.7
75 66.67
54.08
50
D
44.87
32.62 32.9
25.62 23.64
25
0 0.62 1.23
0
Recall Precision F1-score Recall Precision F1-score
Metric
Fig. 9. Models comparison based on recall, precision, and F1-score, according to a regression strategy in EHC prediction of soil cutting
slopes
Discussion
Approach: Normal SMOTEd OVERed
Classification Regression An attempt to predict EHC of both rock and soil cutting slopes
through the application of soft computing techniques, based on
0.0 -0.05 -0.04 -0.05
-0.03 information usually collected during routine inspections (visual in-
-0.08
-0.12
-0.16
formation) was presented. Unfortunately, so far the authors have
not found a model able to do such task with high efficiency.
-0.27 -0.27
Although for rock slopes the achieved performance is somewhat
far away from the expectation, some interesting results were ob-
served for soil cutting slopes, suggesting opportunities for pursuing
-0.5
further developments. Moreover, comparing what has been done so
far, namely the different strategies/approaches applied in order to
AUS
1.00 1.00
0.75 0.75
Frequency
Frequency
A A
0.50 B 0.50 B
C C
D D
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0.25 0.25
0.00 0.00
A B C D A B C D
(a) EHC Experimental (b) EHC Experimental
Fig. 11. ANN models performance comparison in EHC prediction of soil cutting slopes: (a) according to a nominal classification strategy and
following a SMOTEd approach; (b) according to a regression strategy and with no resampling
for this low performance only in the case of Classes C and D pre- this study the authors merged Classes D and E into a single class
diction of rock slopes could be related to the EHC class being as- named D because of modeling concerns). It would be expected that
sumed as representative of the real stability condition of each slope. most of the failures would occur in slopes of Classes C and mainly
Indeed, in analyzing the number of slope failures by EHC class for D. However, for rock slopes such behavior is not observed as shown
rock slopes, there are some indications that the classification attrib- in Fig. 13, which shows the annual probability of failure (normalized
uted to each rock slope could lack some accuracy as reported in the to the value in EHC Class A) for each EHC class. In fact, the number
work of Power et al. (2016), which used the same source of infor- of failures for each EHC class is almost constant from Classes A to
mation, but instead of four classes, they considered five classes (in D, particularly when compared with soil cuttings. For example, the
0 2 4 A B C D E
Relative Importance (%) Earthworks Hazard Category (EHC)
Fig. 12. Relative importance bar plot of the 20 most relevant variables Fig. 13. Annual probability of failure (normalized to the lowest EHC
according to ANN model with SMOTEd approach and following a category) for each EHC and each earthwork asset type (adapted from
nominal classification strategy in EHC prediction of soil cutting slopes Power et al. 2016)
of soil cutting slopes than in rock slopes. istical learning: Data mining, inference, and prediction, 2nd Ed.,
Springer, New York.
Husein Malkawi, A. I., Hassan, W. F., and Abdulla, F. A. (2000). “Uncer-
tainty and reliability analysis applied to slope stability.” Struct. Saf.,
Acknowledgments 22(2), 161–187.
Javadi, A. A., Ahangar-Asr, A., Johari, A., Faramarzi, A., and Toll, D.
This work was supported by FCT, Fundação para a Ciência e a (2012). “Modelling stress-strain and volume change behaviour of
Tecnologia, within Institute for Sustainability and Innovation in unsaturated soils using an evolutionary based data mining technique,
Structural Engineering (ISISE), project UID/ECI/04029/2013 as an incremental approach.” Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell., 25(5), 926–933.
well Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013 and through the post- Kang, F., Han, S., Salgado, R., and Li, J. (2015). “System probabilistic
doctoral grant fellowship with reference SFRH/BPD/94792/2013. stability analysis of soil slopes using Gaussian process regression with
This work was also partly financed by Fundo Europeu de Desen- Latin hypercube sampling.” Comput. Geotech., 63(Jan), 13–25.
volvimento Regional (FEDER) funds through the Competitivity Kang, F., and Li, J. (2016). “Artificial bee colony algorithm optimized sup-
Factors Operational Programme—COMPETE and by national port vector regression for system reliability analysis of slopes.” J. Com-
put. Civ. Eng., 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000514, 04015040.
funds through FCT within the scope of the project POCI-01-
Kang, F., Li, J.-S., and Li, J.-J. (2016a). “System reliability analysis of
0145-FEDER-007633. This work has been also supported by slopes using least squares support vector machines with particle swarm
COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043. A special thanks optimization.” Neurocomputing, 209(Oct), 46–56.
goes to Network Rail that kindly make available the data (basic Kang, F., Li, J.-S., Wang, Y., and Li, J. (2017). “Extreme learning machine-
earthworks examination data and the Earthworks Hazard Condition based surrogate model for analyzing system reliability of soil slopes.”
scores) used in this work. Eur. J. Environ. Civ. Eng., 21(11), 1341–1362.
Kang, F., Xu, Q., and Li, J. (2016b). “Slope reliability analysis using sur-
rogate models via new support vector machines with swarm intelli-
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