Initiated by Dr. Xin Wei, University of Michigan
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Efficient reliability analysis of earth dam slope stability using extreme gradient boosting method

Citation

Wang, L., Wu, C., Tang, L., et al. (2020). Efficient reliability analysis of earth dam slope stability using extreme gradient boosting method. Acta Geotechnica, 15: 3135-3150. Link to paper

Abstract

This paper proposes an XGBoost-based reliability analysis framework to efficiently estimate earth-dam slope failure probability under spatially variable soil properties. The method is motivated by the high computational cost of conventional probabilistic reliability analyses and is demonstrated on an adapted Ashigong earth dam case. Results indicate that the approach can estimate failure probability with good efficiency while retaining reasonable accuracy for engineering use. The study also highlights strong sensitivity of failure probability to coefficient of variation, scale of fluctuation, and the selected auto-correlation function. Findings show that commonly used single-exponential ACF assumptions may be unconservative for this problem setting.