Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355

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Computers and Structures

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compstruc

Application of pool-based active learning in reducing the number of

required response history analyses
Jalal Kiani a, Charles Camp a, Shahram Pezeshk a,⇑, Naeem Khoshnevis b
a
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA
b
Department of Computer Science, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A step by step method is presented for reducing the need for a large number of response history analyses
Received 17 June 2020 (RHAs) in developing surrogates to predict the structural responses. These surrogates, which map ground
Accepted 2 August 2020 motions features and characteristics of the structural systems into structural responses, are used in deriv-
Available online 20 August 2020
ing fragility curves; and mostly are developed using machine learning algorithms. A machine learning
algorithm, depending on the complexity of the model, requires a sufficient amount of training data to
Keywords: predict the outputs accurately. For complicated structural models, generating training data can be com-
Machine learning
putationally demanding. Therefore, there is a need to generate the least amount of training data while
Active learning
Neural networks
preserving the accuracy of the prediction models. Towards this goal, a pool-based query-by-committee
Response history analyses active learning (AL) algorithm is applied to choose probably the most informative data samples for sur-
Fragility curve rogate training. A pool of unlabeled GM data samples is generated and a committee of artificial neural
networks (ANNs) is defined to choose the smallest subset of the data that would be the most informative
training data. The selected data samples meet informativeness, representativeness, and diversity criteria.
The results of the applied case study show that implementing AL, can considerably reduce the size of
required training data and consequently the amount of RHAs while improving the performance of the
prediction models. Specifically, the findings demonstrate that AL improves the average F-scores of
ANNs by about 10% and significantly reduces their variations, which indicates its stable behavior.
Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction ficiently estimate the seismic demand in the structural systems

Seismic risk assessment within the performance-based earth-
quake engineering framework involves performing response his-
tory analyses (RHAs). The results from the RHAs eventually
quantify the distribution of the structural responses and are used
to derive fragility curves. A critical issue concerning RHAs is the
appropriate number of required ground motions (GMs) for per-
forming seismic demand analysis. Based on the statistical theory
[1], using a large sample of GMs for RHAs leads to a more accurate
estimation of the structural responses. However, it is not practical
to use a large number of GMs for RHAs using sophisticated nonlin-
ear numerical models due to demands on computational resources
and long model run times. A procedure that can accurately and suf-
Abbreviations: RHA, Response History Analysis; GM, Ground Motion; AL, Active
Learning; PL, Passive Learning; ANN, Artificial Neural Network; QBC, Query by
Committee.
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: spezeshk@memphis.edu (S. Pezeshk).
based on a minimal number of RHAs would be a significant
improvement. Here accuracy will measure the difference between
the structural response resulted from a sample set of GMs and that
from a large number of GMs. The estimated structural response is
said to be sufficient and stable if the group-to-group variability
among the structural responses estimated using different sample
sets of GMs is small.
Numerous studies have been conducted to estimate the opti-
mum number of required RHAs to address the limitations associ-
ated with computational resources and time. Kiani et al. [2]
reviewed and discussed a large number of research studies [3–9]
focused on minimizing the number of required RHAs and examin-
ing the reliability of the structural responses obtained from a lim-
ited number of RHAs. The findings of these studies suggest that
specifying a minimal number of GMs for performing RHAs is a sub-
jective choice. Overall, despite the prevalent importance of the
number of RHAs on the accuracy and stability of the estimated
structural responses, there is no a holistic methodology in the lit-

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compstruc.2020.106355
0045-7949/Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
2 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355
erature that can be used to find the optimal number of required
RHAs for an arbitrary structural system.
An alternative approach is to build surrogate models to acceler-
ate large computations. Recent developments in machine learning
techniques provide powerful tools to develop surrogate models for
predicting the responses of numerical simulations (e.g., [10]). In
this case, based on a sufficient amount of training data, surrogate
models are generated, and then used to map input parameters to
output results without demanding significant computational
resources or time. Several research studies [11–20] used machine
learning tools for quantifying the distribution of the structural
responses and deriving the parameters of fragility curves.
When developing surrogates for RHAs, the prediction model maps
GM features and the characteristics of the structural systems as input
data into the structural responses as output data. In general, a set of
the input data samples is refereed to unlabeled data; whereas, their
combination with corresponding output is called labeled data. The
process of developing surrogates using machine learning techniques
is called training. Depending on the complexity of the model, the
training process requires a sufficient amount of labeled data. Kiani
et al. [16] discussed that the performance of different machine learn-
ing models in predicting the structural responses significantly
depends on the number of observations used for training (i.e., the
number of GMs used for RHAs). Although using a large labeled data-
base of GMs leads to a better and more accurate estimation of the
seismic demand, labeling a large set of GMs (e.g., categorizing into
collapse or non-collapse classes using the results of RHAs) is often
expensive and even impractical for complicated structural systems.
When labeling the input data is computationally demanding,
active learning (AL) techniques can be very efficient and beneficial
tools for training machine learning models (e.g., see Settles 2009
and references therein). Starting with the least amount of data to
train a model, AL trains some prediction models and searches the
pool of unlabeled data for the most informative data samples that
will improve the performance of the prediction models. Since
labeling data is considered a computationally demanding task, AL
can significantly reduce the amount of required training data and
improve computational efficiency.
Among many different AL algorithms, in this study, a batch-mode
pool-based query by committee (QBC) method (e.g., see Khoshnevis
and Taborda [22]) is utilized to reduce the computational time for
training the prediction models. Initially, in this method, a pool of
unlabeled data samples is generated. Using the least amount of
labeled data samples, several prediction models are trained, which
are called committee members. Following guidelines which are men-
tioned in the Methodology section, another batch of unlabeled data
samples from the pool are chosen and labelled using RHAs. The
new batch of data sample are added into the training data and the
process is repeated until either the predefined performance criteria
are reached, or the computational budget is met.
The structural responses of a 2D 8-story structural system sub-
jected to a set of GMs selected based on the generalized conditional
intensity measure framework GCIM [23] is considered. Artificial neu-
ral networks (ANNs) are implemented to predict the structural
responses from the seismic inputs. F-score is used to measure the
performance of trained ANNs using the unseen test dataset. Addition-
ally, the performance of ANNs due to the effects of the imbalanced
dataset, the method for initializing the weights of ANNs, and the
batch size are investigated. Results show that using AL improves
the performance of ANNs and reduces the variation in the outcomes.
2. Study dataset
The study dataset is a compilation of different elements, includ-
ing structural characteristics, GMs’ features, and the response of
the structure subjected to GMs. Each part of the dataset has been
generated in previous studies, and those details are presented in
the following sections. Results from analyses of an 8-story building
subjected to 2000 GM records are utilized to build the dataset. In
addition, 22 different features describing the severity of the input
GMs are computed. As a result, the dataset includes 2000 data
samples with 22 features. This dataset is called unlabeled data.
RHAs are conducted for all samples in the dataset and the maxi-
mum inter-story drift ratio (MIDR) is computed to label them.
Due to the required RHAs, labeling data samples is considered a
computationally demanding task.
The following sections provide further information about the
applied structural system, seismic input GMs, and seismic demand
analysis method.
2.1. Structural model
This study is based on the structural responses of an 8-story
building with the overall dimensions of 36.56 m by 36.56 m in plan
and 30.19 m in elevation. The structural system of the applied
building includes perimeter special steel moment-resisting frames
with reduced beam section connections and an interior gravity
load system. The building has a fundamental period of about
2.3 s and was designed for a site located in Los Angeles, CA. Ghas-
semieh and Kiani [24] provided the design details of the building,
including the size and arrangement of beam and columns and
the detailing of connections and panel zones. The building is mod-
eled in OpenSees as a 2-D centerline model using the lumped plas-
ticity model. Since the structural system is symmetric, the
numerical model consists of a single two-dimensional external
frame. The structural model accounts for the destabilizing effects
of gravity loads through applying one-half story weight to lean-
on columns (i.e., members with very high axial stiffness and negli-
gible flexural stiffness connected to the main frame using rigid ele-
ments). Also, the computational model considers stiffness and
strength deterioration using Modified Ibarra-Medina-Krawinkler
Deterioration model [25].
2.2. GM dataset
This study uses the GCIM framework to select a set of GM
records consistent with the seismic hazard of the site. The GCIM
has its basis on the assumption that all intensity measures (IMs),
which characterize the severity of a GM, follow a multivariate log-
normal distribution. A detailed procedure for constructing the
GCIM target and selecting GMs based on this framework is pro-
vided elsewhere [23,26]. Briefly, constructing the GCIM framework
requires an IM as the primary GM feature (called conditioning IM)
to build the conditional distributions of other IMs and link the
results of probabilistic seismic hazard analyses to structural
responses. In this study, spectrum intensity (SI) is used as the con-
ditioning IM based on the recommendations of Kiani and Pezeshk
[27].
Additionally, based on the GCIM framework, it is required to
consider all those GM characteristics that recognized as important
for predicting the structural responses. Hence, a large numbers of
IMs that identified as important in predicting the structural
responses [27] are considered including: acceleration spectrum
intensity ASI, displacement spectrum intensity DSI , peak ground
acceleration PGA, cumulative absolute velocity CAV, significant
duration (i.e., Ds5–75 and Ds5–95), and spectral acceleration SA at
periods of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7.5,
and 10 s. Additionally, as listed in Table 1, 20 hazard levels are con-
sidered, including the levels with the exceedance probabilities of
50% to 0.0005% in 50 years. After building the target GCIM using
OPENSHA [28], 100 GMs are selected that match to the target over
 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355
Table 1
The considered hazard levels and their equivalent earthquake intensity computed for a site located in Los Angeles, CA.
LevelNo. Hazard Level with Probability of exceedance Intensity level with SI
in 50 years (cm s/s)
1 50% 44.04
2 30% 58.69
3 20% 69.97
4 10% 90.76
5 5% 113.30
6 3% 131.93
7 2% 146.56
8 1.5% 157.91
9 1% 175.21
10 0.5% 205.45
each hazard level (i.e., in total 20 hazard levels
100 GMs over
each hazard = 2000 GMs). Kiani et al. [2] provide detailed informa-
tion about the selected GMs and their characteristics.
2.3. Seismic demand analysis
In this study, the multiple stripe analysis [29], which is able to
implement hazard-consistent GMs over different earthquake IM
levels, is used for performing RHAs to capture the distribution of
the structural responses in terms of MIDR. Then, all GM samples
are labelled into one out of two applied classes based on the
resulted MIDR. Data samples with MIDR < 0.03 rad are labeled as
Class 1; otherwise, they are labeled as Class 2. There is a significant
drop in the lateral resistance of the structural system based on the
result of pushover analysis [30] at this level of MIDR. Hence, it can
be assumed that the structure is in collapse or near collapse phase.
Because of the importance of this phase of structural behavior, it is
used for the purpose of this study. Notably, the suggested process
in this study can be implemented to derive the parameters of fra-
gility curves for other damage levels in any structural or geotech-
nical systems. To implement the suggested method for any
arbitrary cases, it is just required to label the GM samples into
two different classes based on the considered limit state (i.e.,
whether the GM sample exceeds the considered limit state or not
based on the RHA’s results).
Fig. 1(a) presents the percentage of GM samples exceeding the
considered limit state over different hazard levels. In addition,
Fig. 1(b) shows the distribution of spectral acceleration (SA) at
the fundamental period of the structural systems, SA(T = 2.3 s),
over different earthquake intensity levels for both Class 1 and Class
2. There are no sample GMs causing MIDR > 0.03 rad over the first
six earthquake intensity levels. In this dataset, the two classes are
not balanced with the majority of GM samples in Class 1 (1,474 out
of 2,000 GMs).
2.4. Fragility curves
The obtained labeled data from the previous steps provide the
number of GMs exceeding the considered limit state to the total
number of GMs used over each earthquake intensity level (the frac-
tions of GMs exceeding the considered limit state). From this data,
seismic fragility curves are generated using methods of estimating
the parameters of distribution such as maximum likelihood. How-
ever, this methodology is computationally demanding as it uses a
fixed number of GM samples over a large number of hazard levels.
Much of the cost with this methodology comes from the labeling of
GMs, which are randomly sampled and selected. In classical
approaches for deriving seismic fragility curves, GMs to be labeled
are randomly and probabilistically drawn from a target
distribution.
3
LevelNo. Hazard Level with Probability of exceedance Intensity level with SI
in 50 years (cm s/s)
11 0.25% 239.56
12 0.2% 250.80
13 0.15% 266.07
14 0.1% 289.19
15 0.05% 330.0
16 0.025% 375.14
17 0.015% 410.63
18 0.01% 439.39
19 0.007% 466.35
20 0.005% 493.29
Kiani et al. [16] proposed an alternative method using machine
learning tools for predicting the structural responses. Their method
involves training a prediction model using the labeled data. The
trained model can be implemented to predict the structural
responses for arbitrary GMs. The results in terms of generated data
points can be applied to derive the parameters of fragility curves.
However, developing such a prediction model initially involves
having a large number of labeled data points. With this problem
as motivation, in this study, AL technique is applied to reduce
the number of labeled data points required for training machine
learning models, which are then used for predicting the structural
responses.
3. Methodology
The methodology used in this study is based on AL, which has
its basis on the idea that machine learning tools can achieve better
performance while using as few labeled observations as possible
for training [21]. In AL, the classifier can query for the label of unla-
beled data points to be used for training and learning. For this pur-
pose, the active learner, in a series of steps, tries to choose the most
valuable data points with the highest informativeness, representa-
tiveness, and diversity from the pool of unlabeled data points. AL
techniques are very useful tools where the unlabeled data samples
come at little cost but labeling them is time-consuming and expen-
sive. The main difference between AL and the commonly used pas-
sive learning (PL) is the ability to query sample data points based
upon past queries and responses. PL builds prediction models
based on a large number of randomly selected labeled data points
while AL judiciously asks for the labeled data points that have the
best chance to improve the performance of machine learning
models.
In AL, there are several different methodologies to query the
label of data samples, such as membership query synthesis,
stream-based selective sampling, and pool-based sampling [21].
This study uses a pool-based sampling scenario which assumes
that there is a large pool of unlabeled data points. As will be
explained later, this technique draws instances from the pool of
unlabeled data based on some informativeness measure. Detailed
explanations about other scenarios can be found in Settles [21]
and references therein.
In addition, AL involves evaluating the informativeness of unla-
beled data samples. As discussed by Settles [21], there are several
methods of formulating such query strategies, including uncer-
tainty sampling, QBC, expected model change, estimated error
reduction, etc. This study implements the QBC algorithm [31] in
which a set of models, which are trained on the current labeled
data, are maintained as committee members. Each committee
member or prediction model is allowed to vote on the labeling of
query candidates.
4 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355
Fig. 1. (a) The percentage of GMs belong to Class 2 with MIDR greater than 0.03 rad over each hazard level. (b) The distribution of SA(T = 2.3 s) over different earthquake
intensity levels for Class 1 and Class 2. The thick gray line represents the interquartile range, and the thin gray line represents 1.5 times of interquartile range.
3.1. The workflow of the applied method
Fig. 2 illustrates the workflow of the proposed methodology for
accurately generating a prediction model while reducing the num-
ber of required RHAs. Achieving an accurate prediction model
based on this methodology involves the following steps.
Step 1. Data collection: collect unlabeled data in terms of earth-
quake GM records. It is important to select a large number of GMs
and ensure that they are representative of the seismic hazard of the
site. See the Study Dataset Section for more details.
Step 2. Set up: choose a set of GMs to initialize the training pro-
cess. When selecting the initial set of GMs, consider two essential
criteria, including representativeness and diversity. Diversity
means that the selected data samples should scatter across the full
input space rather than concentrating in a small local region [32].
In the present case, diversity guarantees that the selected GMs
come from a variety of low- to high-intensity earthquake levels.
Selected GMs should be diverse; otherwise, the machine learning
models probably learn less using GMs with similar characteristics.
Representativeness is a measure of the number of data samples
that are similar or close to the target sample [32]. K-means cluster-
ing [33] is a common practice in choosing the initial set of data
samples for AL algorithms to ensure the representativeness and
diversity. For this purpose, it is required to partition unlabeled
GM samples into k clusters and then find k number of GM samples
(a batch of data with size k) that are closet to the centers of clus-
ters. Then, these data samples are removed from the pool of unla-
beled data and are put into the query list.
Step 3. Labeling: perform RHAs to estimate the responses of the
structure subjected to GMs in the query list and determine their
labels (e.g., collapse and non-collapse). The output is binary indi-
cating whether each GM exceeds the considered limit state.
Step 4. Training: train a set of machine learning models (com-
mittee members in QBC method) using the existing labeled GMs,
where GM features and binary results of RHAs are used as the input
and output, respectively. Train N committee members using N dif-
ferent combinations of labeled data (i.e., randomly splitting into N
different combinations of training and validation sets).
Step 5. Prediction: predict the label of the rest of unlabeled GMs
by passing them to the committee members. Each committee
member produces a hypothesis for the unseen GM samples in
accordance with the previously labeled GMs. The hypotheses pro-
duced by each committee member are labels for the unseen GMs.
Step 6. Disagreement measure: select those GMs with the high-
est informativeness from the pool of unlabeled GMs. Informative-
ness means that the selected data samples must contain
important information such that labeling them would considerably
improve the performance of the models. The QBC method is used
to examine the informativeness of unlabeled GM samples based
on the disagreement among the committee members. The more
disagreement among the committee members about a GM sample,
the more uncertain the GM sample is, and, therefore, the more
informative it is. For example, if all committee members predict
that a specific GM sample causes collapse, this GM sample is not
an informative one and, hence, adding it to the query list does
not improve the performance of the models. On the other hand,
 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355 5

Fig. 2. Workflow of the proposed methodology for reducing the number of required RHAs.

if some committee members predict that a sample GM leads to col-
lapse while others forecast non-collapse label, this GM sample is a
valuable and informative one.
Select those 2 k GM samples that committee members have the
most disagreement among them based on the predicted labels in
the previous step. Vote entropy VE is used to quantify committee
disagreement for an individual GM sample GM* [34].
X V ðl; GM Þ
V ðl; GM Þ
VEðGM Þ ¼  log
N N
l ing models provide satisfactory performance.
where V ðl; GM  Þ is the number of committee members (out of N
members) voting for label l for GM*.
Then, half of GMs (k GM samples) are selected based on diver-
sity and representativeness. For this purpose, the distances
between each of 2 k samples are computed. Next, a GM sample
is selected that has the largest sum of distances from others (call
it sample A) and it is added to the query list. Next, the closest
GM sample to sample A is identified and removed from the
selected dataset. This process is repeated until there are no remain-
ing GM samples. Choosing a GM sample with the farthest distance
from the others in the set satisfies the diversity criteria and remov-
ing the closest GM sample improves the representativeness of the
sampling approach.
Step 7. Retraining: repeat Step 4 to Step 6 by labeling the query
list, retraining prediction models, and updating committee mem-
ð1Þ bers until labeling data budget is exhausted or the machine learn-
3.2. The applied machine learning method
Every classification model can be enhanced with AL. Kiani et al.
[16] applied a large number of classification methods for predicting
the structural responses and they found that Random Forest and ANNs
perform better than others when the data is imbalanced. Hence, this
6 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355
study implements ANNs as learner methodologies for predicting the
structural responses given seismic input. An ANN is based on a collec-
tion of interconnected nodes called neurons over different layers
loosely modeling the biological neurons in a brain. These artificial neu-
rons are connected by weighted values over different levels. This
means that given an input value, a neuron initially performs some sort
of computations, and then the resulted value will be multiplied by a
weight. After applying an activation function to the weighted output,
the results for each layer will be used as the input for the next layer.
Training an ANN involves optimizing weights to minimize the
error between the actual responses and the predicted ones. This
study uses the scaled conjugate gradient backpropagation opti-
mization method for training ANNs, which includes updating the
weights and biases to reduce the error. This algorithm is used in
this study because it is a computationally efficient algorithm for
ANNs, and it can shorten iteration without reducing the quality
of training and testing results. Initial ANN results indicate that
using more than two hidden layers does not improve the perfor-
mance. Fig. 3 shows the configuration of the ANN with 22 and 11
neurons in the hidden layers 1 and 2, respectively. More impor-
tantly, since the input data or IMs come from different scales, the
data is normalized to improve the performance and stability of
ANNs. Additionally, those IMs (22 IMs) that were used earlier for
GM selection are considered as input features.
This study examines the performance or generalization of the
trained ANNs in predicting the structural responses using the test sub-
set. For this purpose, 20% of the entire data is randomly assigned to the
hold-out test set. Also, 80% and 20% of the remaining data are allocated
to the training and validation sets, respectively. Then, the training and
validation sets are implemented to fit ANNs and prevent overfitting.
Later, the hold-out test dataset is used to obtain an unbiased evalua-
tion of the trained ANNs. Additionally, the process of randomly divid-
ing the dataset and fitting ANNs models is repeated 100 times to
reduce the error that might be induced in the results due to randomly
dividing the dataset into test, training, and validation subsets.
F-score is used to measure the performance of ANNs in predict-
ing the structural responses. F-score is the weighted harmonic
mean of precision and recall. Precision is the ratio of the number
of positive instances that are predicted correctly to the number
of instances predicted as positive; while recall is defined as the
fraction of the number of positive samples that are predicted cor-
rectly to the total number of actual positives in the dataset.
4. Results and discussion
In this section, the performance of AL is examined in predicting
the structural responses using the dataset described above.
Fig. 3. (a) The architecture of applied ANN and (b) anatomy of a single node or neuron. The input for ANNs is the features of GMs (i.e., IMs) and the output is structural
responses (binary class). The hidden layers use the hyperbolic tangent activation function and the output layer uses sigmoid activation function.
4.1. Considered scenarios
Two different sampling conditions are considered, including AL,
which selects GM samples using the procedure discussed in Sec-
tion 3.1. and PL, which randomly samples k GMs at each iteration.
As explained in Step 4, AL trains a set of committee members (ANNs
herein) at each iteration after updating the query list and labeling the
data samples in this list. For training ANNs in the first iteration of AL,
biases are initialized with zero while the weights are randomly ini-
tialized based on Nguyen-Widrow initialization algorithm [35].
When ANNs are trained, they, as committee members, select the
most valuable and informative data samples and add them to the
query list for labeling based on the procedure explained in Step 6.
For the next iteration of AL, the updated labeled data samples are
used for training the new committee members. In these iterations,
unlike the first iteration, there are two different options for retraining
ANNs including: first, randomly setting the initial weights; and sec-
ond, using the weights of the pre-trained models as the starting
points. Instead of randomly estimating the initial weights, the second
method considers the weights of the trained models in the previous
iteration as the initial weights of the new models and update them
using the labeled dataset. Both methods are used to examine their
impact on the results.
As discussed earlier, the dataset used in this study is not bal-
anced, with most of the data samples belonging to Class 1. To
examine the effect of class imbalance on the performance of the
trained model using AL, one more case that removes all those
GM samples over Level 1 to Level 5 (in total 500 GM sample) is
considered since all of them belong to Class 1. The new dataset
includes 1500 GM samples, which 974 of them belong to Class 1,
and 526 of them belong to Class 2. In this case, the ratio of data
samples in Class 1 to those belong to Class 2 is 1.85; while in the
original dataset this ratio is 2.8. As the imbalance degree in the
new dataset (with 1500 sample GMs) is less than that for the orig-
inal data (with 1500 sample GMs), it is called as the balanced data-
set henceforth. Also, the original dataset is called the imbalanced
dataset.
For simulations, k GMs are selected at each iteration according
to the procedure discussed earlier and the process is stopped once
600 GMs are processed. One key challenge for AL is to choose an
efficient value for k or the batch size. For the first part of the study,
a batch size of 10 is used, but later the importance of the batch size
on the results is examined by considering three more cases with
the batch size of 5, 15, and 20. Even though all GMs are labeled
and categorized into two different classes, it is assumed that all
of them are unlabeled. At each iteration, ten different ANNs (i.e.,
ten committee members) are trained using the labeled GMs.
 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355
Table 2
The considered methods for training ANNs.
Scenario name Learning Process
AL-IMB-T AL
AL-IMB-R AL
AL-BAL-T AL
PL-IMB-T PL
AL-IMB-T-5 AL
AL-IMB-T-15 AL
AL-IMB-T-20 AL
In total, the cases presented in Table 2 are considered for this
study.
4.2. Properties of the selected GMs by the active learning algorithm
Fig. 4 shows the distribution of all applied GM samples as a
function of the first and second principal components, which are
the linear combinations of original GM features. Also, this figure
shows the location of queried GM samples at different iterations
of the AL process. As seen, the proposed methodology keeps track
of the used GMs and queries for the label of new GMs. Additionally,
Fig. 5 shows magnitude-distance of all unlabeled GMs associated
with the location of labeled GMs over three different iterations.
The results demonstrate that the algorithm initially selects GM
samples over a wide range of intensities, magnitudes, and dis-
tances due to using the criteria of diversity and representativeness.
In the next iterations, the algorithm also intends to select GMs over
a wide range of magnitude and distance. However, it mainly
chooses those GM samples around the minimum values of first
principal components, which are equivalent to high-intensity
GMs (i.e., GMs with high SI values). Hence, committee members
have a considerable disagreement about GM samples from high
earthquake intensity levels.
Fig. 6 presents the percentage of the selected GM samples over
different hazard levels and classes for different considered scenar-
ios of AL. The AL algorithm intends to use those GM samples from
the hazard level of 15 (with the exceedance probability of 0.05% in
50 years and SI = 330 cm s/s) for all considered AL cases. This haz-
ard level, on average, has a contribution of about 18% (i.e., 8.5%
from Class 1 and 9.5% from Class 2). Accumulation of more training
GM samples at this hazard level suggests that learning over this
level is very challenging. Moreover, Fig. 1 (a) shows that about
50% of the applied GM samples over this level exceed the consid-
Fig. 4. Distribution of selected GM samples based on AL-IMB-T for repetition 1. (a) also shows the initial selected set of GM samples using k-means clustering. (b) and (c)
presents the queried GM samples by the algorithm after getting trained for10 and 100 training GM samples, respectively.
7
Weights Dataset Batch Size
Transferred Imbalanced 10
Random Imbalanced 10
Transferred Balanced 10
Transferred Imbalanced 10
Transferred Imbalanced 5
Transferred Imbalanced 15
Transferred Imbalanced 20
ered limit state, meaning that half of them belongs to Class 2.
Because of that AL approximately choose equally from both classes
over this level. More importantly, the intensity of this level in
terms of SI is 330 cm s/s, which is interestingly very close to the
median of the resulted fragility curve from the observed data
(l ¼ 339cm:s=s). This demonstrates that AL finds those GM sam-
ples from the hazard level with the same intensity as the median
of the fragility curve as informative and valuable data points. On
the other hand, the lowest contribution is for low-intensity levels,
in which most of GMs belong to Class 1 for both balanced and
imbalanced datasets. Specifically, the total contribution of levels
of 1 to 10 is about 8%, showing that the selected GMs over these
hazard levels are not highly valuable in improving the performance
of ANNs and in predicting the structural responses. Finally, Fig. 6
shows that there is no significant difference between the results
of four different AL scenarios.
Fig. 7 presents the percentage of the selected GM samples from
different hazard levels over ten initial iterations of AL-IMB-T. This
figure shows that AL initially chooses GM samples over a wide
range of hazard levels to consider diversity and representativeness.
Specifically, a considerable number of the selected GM samples
come from the hazard levels of 3, 7, 13, and 18. However, as the
algorithm goes further, the contribution of low-intensity levels sig-
nificantly decreases, and the algorithm mostly finds those GM
samples over the hazard levels of 15 and 16 as informative ones.
Interestingly, the contribution of very rare hazard levels (i.e., 17–
20) is less than the levels of 15 and 16 with the intensity close to
the median of fragility curves. For the present case, which is an
imbalanced dataset, the algorithm has initially little information
about the minority class (Class 2) and intends to select most of
GM samples from the majority class (Class 1). Then, the algorithm
will be less certain about Class 2 and, therefore, produces more GM
8 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355

Fig. 5. Magnitude-distance distribution of selected GMs based on AL-IMB-T for repetition 1. (a) Also shows the initial selected set of GMs using k-means clustering. (b) and (c)
presents the queried GMs by the algorithm after getting trained for10 and 100 training GM samples, respectively.

Fig. 6. Bar plot showing the average percentage of used GMs over different hazard levels based on their class for 10 initial iterations. Note that this figure is the average of the
results for 100 repetitions.

samples for labeling from this class. As shown, after the initial iter- to 600 GMs) using the imbalanced dataset. There are a few findings
ation, the model mostly chooses GM samples from Class 2. concerning the results presented in this figure:

4.3. Performance of active learning versus passive learning  As expected, the performance of ANNs is significantly higher
when considering Class 1 as the positive class rather than Class
Fig. 8 compares the performance of AL and PL in terms of F- 2 irrespective of the applied sampling method. This is mainly
score per class with the number of populations (ranging from 10 due to the unequal distribution of classes within the applied
 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355 9

Fig. 7. The percentage of the selected GMs from each hazard level over ten initial iterations for AL-IMB-T. Note that this figure is the average results for 100 repetitions.

Fig. 8. (a) Performance of models trained using AL-IMB-T and PL-IMB-T methods in terms of F-score as a function of the number of populations. Pink and green dots,
respectively, represent single replications of the AL-IMB-T and PL-IMB-T experiments. The solid black line represents the average performance of AL-IMB-T, and the yellow
dashed line shows the average performance of PL-IMB-T. A small amount of horizontal random variation is added to each data point to handle over plotting. (b) Density
distributions of F-scores in three different population categories. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version
of this article.)

dataset. The imbalance dataset biases the performance of the
prediction models towards the majority class; Class 1. Addition-
ally, a comparison of density plots explains that the variation of
the results is higher for Class 2 than Class 1.
 The results demonstrate that AL generally provides larger F-
scores in comparison to PL. For both classes, PL, which are
trained on the randomly labeled data, does not achieve the
same performance as AL given the same number of data sam-
ples used for training. More importantly, the efficiency of AL
10 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355
is more visible when it comes to Class 2, which is the minority
class. Specifically, for Class 2, the performance of ANNs
improves, on average, by 10% when using AL instead of PL. In
overall, using the gain in performance and reduction in the cost
resulting from the proposed method based on AL are clear.
 At initial iterations (i.e., up to about 40 GM samples for Class 1,
and up to about 80 GM samples for Class 2), both AL and PL
methods provide poor performance in terms of F-score. At these
iterations, increasing the training samples considerably
improves the average performance of ANNs irrespective of the
applied learning process. However, after these thresholds, the
average performance of ANNs does not change with the
increase in the training size. This demonstrates that there is
an optimal number for GM samples needed for training the pre-
diction models that leads to acceptable performance.
 The variation in PL’s results is much higher compared to AL’s
results. The density plots also confirm that the AL models are
intended to be more focused than the PL models. Furthermore,
the uncertainty in the results decreases as the training size
increases, particularly for the AL method.
 The results show that F-scores for some of the models trained
based on PL is small and never improve. When the weights of
the pre-trained models used as the starting points for the next
iteration, the loss function for ANNs may end up in local minima
and never get better. This issue can happen in both AL and PL;
however, in PL, it is more common as shown in Fig. 8. As a
result, this study uses an ensemble model (i.e., combining the
predictions form multiple models trained in 100 repetitions)
to reduce the effect of this issue.
4.4. Statistical significance of the results
An important factor in the performance analysis of AL and PL is
whether the results statistically provide convincing evidence that
AL outperforms PL in predicting the structural responses. It is
required to estimate whether the difference between AL and PL
results is true and reliable or just due to statistical chance. The
most popular statistical test used for this purpose is the paired Stu-
dent’s t-test combined via random subsamples of the training data-
set [36]. However, the key assumption of this statistical test is
violated when using random resampling because the test and
training sets overlap in different repetitions and, thus, they are
not independent [36]. Nadeau and Bengio [37] demonstrated that
overlapping of test and training sets might lead to an underestima-
Fig. 9. (a) t-static values resulted from the corrected paired Student’s t-test, which is used for examining the significance of the results, (b) the P-values resulted from the
corrected paired Student’s t-test, measuring the difference between AL and PL results, and (c) 95% confidence intervals for the average difference between the performance of
the AL-IMB-T and PL-IMB-T.
tion of variance and suggested a method to correct the variance
estimate. Hence, the paired Student’s t-test with the Nadeau and
Bengio correction is used to determine the statistical significance
of the difference between the results of AL and PL.
The difference between the F-scores for the AL and PL, dj , is:
dj ¼ F ALj  F PLj ð2Þ
where F ALj and F PLj are, respectively, the F-scores for the AL and PL
models measured on the repetition j (1  j  n).
In addition, assume that n1 GM samples are used for training
ANNs, and the remaining n2 GM samples are used for testing. The
t-statistic of the corrected paired Student’s t-test is:
Pn
1
n j¼1 dj
t ¼ rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
  ð3Þ
1
þ nn2 r b2
n 1
where r b 2 is the estimate of the variance of n differences (dj).
This statistic is used with the Student-t distribution with n-1
degrees of freedom to compute the significance of the results and
the confidence intervals. The null hypothesis is: for a randomly
drawn training set, AL and PL will have the same performance on
a randomly drawn test sample. If the null hypothesis is rejected
it suggests that the difference in F-scores is statistically significant.
Fig. 9 presents the resulted t-statistic values, P-values, and 95%
confidence intervals of differences as a function of the number of
data points used for training. The resulted P-values are smaller
than the considered significance level (i.e., 5%), meaning that the
null hypothesis can be rejected. Therefore, the results provide con-
vincing evidence that AL and PL perform differently.
Additionally, the confidence intervals presented in Fig. 9 explain
that AL performs better than PL, particularly for Class 2. For exam-
ple, the results show that with 95% confidence AL results in F-
scores between 0.06 and 0.093 greater than those for PL when
using 100 GM samples for training. On the other hand, the
improvement in F-scores for Class 1 is not as significant as that
for Class 2. The confidence intervals for Class 2 are so close to
the average difference and not clear in the plot.
4.5. The effect of using pre-trained weights
Fig. 10 compares the performance of AL in two different cases,
including AL-IMB-T, which uses the pre-trained weights from the
previous iteration, and AL-IMB-R, which randomly initializing
weights at each iteration. This figure shows that the difference
 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355 11

Fig. 10. (a) Performance of models trained using AL-IMB-T and AL-IMB-R, which measure the effect of using pre-trained weights on the AL results, in terms of F-score as a
function of the number of applied GM samples for training. Pink and green dots, respectively, represent single replications of the AL-IMB-T and AL-IMB-R experiments. The
solid black line represents the average performance of AL-IMB-T, and the yellow dashed line shows the average performance of AL-IMB-R. A small amount of horizontal
random variation is added to each data point to handle over plotting. (b) Density distributions of F-scores in three population categories. (For interpretation of the references
to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

between results is negligible for Class 1; while using pre-trained
weights instead of randomly initializing them can very slightly
decrease the performance of models for Class 2. Fig. 11(b) shows
that the P-values are approximately greater than the considered
significance level when using less than 100 GM samples for train-
ing. This demonstrates that there is no enough evidence to reject
the null hypothesis stating AL-IMB-T and AL-IMB-R have the same
performance at the initial iterations. However, after ten initial iter-
ations, the difference in results due to using pre-trained or random
weights is statistically significant based on the resulted P-values
shown in Fig. 11(c), though the differences are very small and neg-
ligible as shown in Fig. 11(c).
4.6. The effect of balancing dataset
Fig. 12 shows the performance of AL when using the balanced
(AL-BAL-T) and imbalanced (AL-IMB-T) datasets. The results indi-
cate that the performance of ANNs for the minority class (Class
2) is independent of the level of imbalance in the dataset. The sta-
tistical results presented in Fig. 13 also confirms that both AL-BAL-
T and AL-IMB-T perform the same in the case of Class 2. This can be
justified by the fact that the total number of data points belongs to
Class 2 does not change when balancing the data. However, there is
a drop in F-scores for Class 1 when balancing the dataset. This drop
is also evident from the statistical results presented in Fig. 13. The
P-values for Class 1 are almost zero for different training sizes
meaning that the difference between the means of F-scores for
AL-BAL-T and AL-IMB-T are statistically considerable. Also,
Fig. 13(c) shows that the decrease in the performance of ANNs
for Class 1 is about 0.04 due to balancing the dataset. This decrease
in the performance of ANNs in case of the majority class is because
of the decrease in the number of data points belongs to Class 1.
Interestingly, a comparison between the results presented in
Fig. 12 and Fig. 8 explains that the difference between the perfor-

Fig. 11. (a) t-static values resulted from the corrected paired Student’s t-test, which is used for examining the significance of the results, (b) the P-values resulted from the
corrected paired Student’s t-test measuring the effect of using pre-trained weights on the AL results, and (c) 95% confidence intervals for the average difference between the
performance of the AL-IMB-T and AL-IMB-R methods.
12 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355

Fig. 12. (a) Performance of models trained using AL-IMB-T and AL-BAL-T methods, which measure the effect of class imbalance on the AL results, in terms of F-score as a
function of the number of applied GMs. Pink and green dots, respectively, represent single replications of the AL-IMB-T and AL-BAL-T experiments. The solid black line
represents the average performance of AL-IMB-T, and the yellow dashed line shows the average performance of AL-BAL-T. A small amount of horizontal random variation is
added to each data point to handle over plotting. (b) Density distributions of F-scores in three population categories. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this
figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 13. (a) t-static values resulted from the corrected paired Student’s t-test, (b) the P-values resulted from the corrected paired Student’s t-test measuring the effect of class
imbalance on the AL results, and (c) 95% confidence intervals for the average difference between the performance of the AL-IMB-T and AL-BAL-T methods.

Fig. 14. (a) F-scores for AL-IMB-T and PL-IMB-T models versus the training size for repetition 1, (b) F-score variation rates for AL-IMB-T and PL-IMB-T versus the iteration
number for repetition 1, (c) The mean and standard deviation of F-score variation rates for AL-IMB-T and PL-IMB-T versus the iteration number for 100 repetitions.
 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355 13

mance of the AL and PL methods is more visible in case of imbal- consider a large pool of unlabeled data points containing GM sam-
anced dataset than the balanced one. Therefore, to gain an accept- ples from a wide range of hazard levels without any concerns that
able performance when using AL, it is suggested to initially this might lead to a high level of imbalance in the dataset.

Fig. 15. (a), (c), and (e) the P-values resulted from the corrected paired Student’s t-test comparing the average performance of the AL models with the batch size of 10 with
the AL models with the batch size 5, 15, 20, respectively. (b), (d), and (f) 95% confidence intervals for the average difference between the performance of the AL model with the
batch size of 10 and the AL models with batch sizes of 5, 15, and 20, respectively.
14 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355
Fig. 16. The mean and standard deviation of F-score variation rates for models with
batch sizes of 5 and 10 versus the iteration number for 100 repetitions.
4.7. Stability analysis
Stability is a desirable and important criterion of machine
learning tools that provides a basis for the reproducibility. A
machine learning algorithm is said to be stable when the trained
model produces consistent predictions with respect to small
changes in training samples. This criterion is examined in this sec-
tion to compare the performance of AL and PL. Fig. 14(a) shows
how F-scores from AL and PL for repetition 1 change as the number
of training samples increases. For PL, there are significant fluctua-
tions in F-scores as the training size changes; while AL F-scores
appear to be stable. AL F-scores initially increase as the number
of training samples increases, then, remain quite constant.
To quantify these changes in the performance of AL and PL, the
stability is defined as the rate of variation in F-scores with respect
to the change in training size. Fig. 14(b) presents F-score variation
rates, which are the differences between successive F-scores
divided by the batch size, for both AL and PL for repetition 1. F-
score variation rate for AL is constantly increasing over initial iter-
ations, demonstrating the improvement in the performance of the
models with the increase in the size of training. After several iter-
ations, F-score variation rate is approximately zero. On the other
hand, the instability of the PL models is evident from the fluctua-
tions in F-score variation rates. Fig. 14(c) shows the mean and stan-
dard deviation of F-score variation rates for all 100 repetitions
which confirms that using AL leads to more stable results than PL.
4.8. The effect of batch size
In the previous sections, a batch size of 10 is used for training
ANNs meaning that the algorithm selects 10 data points at a time
to be labeled. In this section, the importance of the batch size is
examined on the performance of AL. Fig. 15 presents the results
of the corrected paired Student’s t-test comparing the performance
of models trained using three different batch sizes including 5, 15,
and 20 with the model trained using a batch size of 10. For this
case, the null hypothesis is that there is no difference between
the average performance of models when using a batch size other
than 10. For batch sizes of 15 and 20, Fig. 15(c) and Fig. 15(e) show
that the P-values are approximately greater than 5% explaining
that the difference in the results due to using a batch size greater
than 10 is not statistically significant. For these two cases, Fig. 15
(d) and Fig. 15(f) also confirm that the differences are small and
negligible.
When it comes to the model with a batch size of 5, as shown in
Fig. 15(a), the P-values are less than 5% when using less 200 data
points for training. Hence, there is enough evidence to reject the
null hypothesis, which assumes that models with batch sizes of 5
and 10 have the same performance. Additionally, Fig. 15(b) shows
that the maximum difference in F-scores is about 0.03 for Class 2.
The negative values indicate that the average results for models
with a batch size of 10 are less than those for models with a batch
size of 5. Additionally, Fig. 16 compares the stability of models
when using batch sizes of 5 and 10. There is no significant differ-
ence between the distribution of the variation rates of F-scores
for these batch sizes. Hence, using a batch size of 5 does not lead
to unstable results; while it slightly improves the performance of
prediction models, particularly over initial iterations when the
training size is small. However, the computational cost
increases when using a small batch size, which is not appealing
practically.
5. Conclusion
A methodology is presented based on the pool-based query by
committee active learning (AL) method to reduce the computa-
tional cost associated with developing machine learning models
for predicting the structural responses. Using a step by step
method, three criteria is considered, including informativeness,
diversity, and representativeness, to choose the most
valuable data points or ground motion samples for performing
response history analyses. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) is
used as the surrogate models for predicting the structural
responses. From the results, there are several important
findings:
 The results demonstrated that AL could produce high-level per-
formance classification models in comparison to the commonly
used passive learning (PL) method given the same number of
labeled data points. Hence, a smaller number of labeled ground
motion samples is required for training ANNs when using AL.
Hence, the number of response history analyses required for
labeling ground motion samples decrease when using AL.
 Using AL improves the generalizability of the trained models in
comparison to the models trained using PL, which randomly
selects the input data points. Specifically, it was found that
the variation in the performance of the models trained using
AL is much smaller than that for the models trained using PL.
 AL can be used as a remedy to decrease the detrimental effects
of class imbalance, which is an inherent property of the struc-
tural engineering datasets, on the performance of prediction
models.
 The effect of batch size on the performance of models trained
using AL is examined. The statistical results demonstrated that
using a batch size of 5 could lead to better results over the ini-
tial iterations in which the total number of labeled data points
used for training is small. However, using a small batch size is
computationally demanding. In this trade-off situation, it is sug-
gested using a batch size of 10.
 The performance of ANNs does not significantly change when
using either of pre-trained or random weights as the initial
parameters during training.
Although the results of this study are based on a specific data-
set, they are promising, and the proposed method can be used to
train a surrogate model for predicting the seismic demand in any
structural systems. More importantly, in this study, a data set is
used with a small number of unlabeled data points. However, using
a very large unlabeled dataset (considering that collecting a large
number of unlabeled data points is not computationally demand-
ing) would improve the results.
 J. Kiani et al. / Computers and Structures 241 (2020) 106355 15

Declaration of Competing Interest [17] Mangalathu S, Jeon J-S. Stripe-based fragility analysis of multispan concrete
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