Pore Water Pressure Prediction Based on Machine Learning Methods—Application to an Earth Dam Case

Abstract

Pore water pressure (PWP) response is significant for evaluating the earth dams’ stability, and PWPs are, therefore, generally monitored. However, due to the soil heterogeneity and its non-linear behavior within earths, the PWP is usually difficult to estimate and predict accurately in order to detect a pathology or anomaly in the behavior of an embankment dam. This study endeavors to tackle this challenge through the application of diverse machine learning (ML) techniques in estimating the PWP within an existing earth dam. The methods employed include random forest (RF) combined with simulated annealing (SA), multilayer perceptron (MLP), standard recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and gated recurrent unit (GRU). The prediction capability of these techniques was gauged using metrics such as the coefficient of determination (R2), mean square error (MSE), and CPU training time. It was found that all the considered ML methods could give satisfactory results for the PWP estimation. Upon comparing these methods within the case study, the findings suggest that, in this study, multilayer perceptron (MLP) gives the most accurate PWP prediction, achieving the highest coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.99) and the lowest mean square error (MSE = 0.0087) metrics. A sensitivity analysis is then presented to evaluate the models’ robustness and the hyperparameter’s influence on the performance of the prediction model.