Evaluating the response statistics of nonlinear structures constitutes a key issue in engineering design. Hereby, the Monte Carlo method has proven useful, although the computational cost turns out to be considerably high. In particular, around the design point of the system near structural failure, a reliable estimation of the statistics is unfeasible for complex high-dimensional systems. Thus, in this paper, we develop a machine-learning-enhanced Monte Carlo simulation strategy for nonlinear behaving engineering structures. A neural network learns the response behavior of the structure subjected to an initial nonstationary ground excitation subset, which is generated based on the spectral properties of a chosen ground acceleration record. Then using the superior computational efficiency of the neural network, it is possible to predict the response statistics of the full sample set, which is considerably larger than the initial training sample set. To
K E Y W O R D Searthquake generation, elastoplastic structures, Kanai-Tajimi filter, machine learning, Monte Carlo method, neural networks This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.