A hierarchical system to predict behavior of soil and cantilever sheet wall by data-driven models

The study proposes a framework combining machine learning (ML) models into a logical hierarchical system which evaluates the stability of the sheet wall before other predictions. The study uses the hardening soil (HS) model to develop a 200-sample finite element analysis (FEA) database, to develop the ML models. Consequently, a system containing three trained ML models is proposed to first predict the stability status (random forest classification, RFC) followed by 1) the cantilever top horizontal displacement of sheet wall (artificial neural network regression models, RANN1) and 2) vertical settlement of soil (RANN2). The uncertainty of this data-driven system is partially investigated by developing 1000 RFC models, based on the application of random sampling technique in the data splitting process. Investigation on the distribution of the evaluation metrics reveals negative skewed data toward the 1.0000 value. This implies a high performance of RFC on the database with medians of accuracy, precision, and recall, on test set are 1.0000, 1.0000, and 0.92857, respectively. The regression ANN models have coefficient of determinations on test set, as high as 0.9521 for RANN1, and 0.9988 for RANN2, respectively. The parametric study for these regressions is also provided to evaluate the relative insight influence of inputs to output. © 2022, Higher Education Press.