Multi-block synchronous prediction of concrete dam displacements using MIMO machine learning paradigm

The integration of numerous monitoring points poses a significant challenge to the efficient modeling of dam displacement behavior, and multi-point synchronous prediction is an effective solution. However, traditional approaches usually construct site-specific data-driven models for each monitoring point individually, which focus on single-target regression and discard the underlying spatial correlation among different displacement monitoring points. This study therefore proposes a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) machine learning (ML) paradigm based on support vector machine (SVM) for synchronous modeling and prediction of multi-point displacements from various dam blocks. In this method, a novel multi-output data-driven model, termed as multi-target SVM (MSVM), is formulated through a deep hybridization of classical SVM architecture and multi-target regression. During the initialization of MSVM, the intercorrelation of multiple target variables is fully exploited by decomposing and regulating the weight vectors. The proposed MSVM is designed to capture the complex MIMO mapping from influential factors to multi-block displacements, while taking into account the correlation between multi-block displacement outputs. Additionally, in order to avoid obtaining the unreliable prediction results due to the empirical selection of parameters, an efficient optimization strategy based on the parallel multi-population Jaya (PMP-Jaya) algorithm is used to adaptively tune the hyperparameters involved in MSVM, which contains no algorithm-specific parameters and is easy to implement. The effectiveness of the proposed model is verified using monitoring data collected from a real concrete gravity dam, where its performance is compared with conventional single-target SVM (SSVM)-based models and state-of-the-art ML-based models. The results indicate that our proposed MSVM is much more promising than the SSVM-based models because only one prediction model is required, rather than constructing multiple site-specific SSVM-based models for different dam blocks. Moreover, MSVM can achieve better performance than other ML-based models in most cases, which provides an innovative modeling tool for dam multi-block behavior monitoring.