Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

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Engineering Structures
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/engstruct

A three-stage automated modal identification framework for bridge

parameters based on frequency uncertainty and density clustering
Yi He a, Judy P. Yang b, *, Yi-Feng Li c
a
Research Center of Engineering Vibration and Disaster Prevention & School of Civil Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400045, China
b
Department of Civil Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 300093, Taiwan
c
Xiamen Academy of Building Research Group Co., Ltd, Xiamen, Fujian 361005, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: As the automated modal analysis is crucial for a continuous monitoring system, this study proposes a framework
Automated modal identification for automated modal identification of bridge parameters based on the uncertainty of estimated frequencies and
Frequency uncertainty density-based clustering algorithm, which consists of the following three stages: First, the modal parameters and
DBSCAN algorithm
standard deviations of the estimated frequencies are calculated in a wide range of model orders to construct the
Spurious mode
Bridge modal analysis
stabilization diagram using the reference-based covariance-driven stochastic subspace identification algorithm.
Second, the criteria of frequency uncertainty and stabilization are adopted to eliminate the spurious modes.
Third, for present purpose, the modified version of an unsupervised density-based clustering algorithm is
The selling point of this paper is introduced to group physical modes and detect outliers to reach automated identification of bridge modal pa­
automayed modal itervention rameters. From the analysis, it has shown that the proposed framework is powerful in eliminating the spurious
without relying on manual modes and robust in the presence of interference caused by spurious modes while a simple procedure for clus­
interference. tering physical modes with desired statistical reliability is employed.

1. Introduction structural health diagnosis is crucial to a continuous monitoring system.

The modal analysis provides a way to unveil the dynamic parameters
of a structure. For civil structures, their modal analyses are of special
significance because the identified modal parameters can be treated as
health indicators of the structural systems [1]. The classical methods of
modal analyses, originally developed from mechanical and aerospace
industries, are established under the input-output framework [2].
However, it is difficult to apply artificial excitation for large-scale
structures due to huge energy consumption. As such, the output-only
operational modal identification methods developed in the past few
decades turn to be more practical for civil structures [3], for instance,
the stochastic subspace identification (SSI) [4,5] and eigensystem real­
ization algorithm [6,7]. These methods do not require artificial loads
applied to the structures, and they measure structural responses under
the unknown ambient excitations such as traffic and wind. The modal
parameters are then extracted by applying the principles of multivariate
statistics. On the other hand, many long-span bridges have been
installed with long-term monitoring systems [8,9], which often gener­
ates massive data that is impractical to be digested by manual analyses.
Therefore, the automatic modal analysis providing the real-time
In the operational modal identification, due to many reasons [10],
the identified results generally include not only physical modes but also
spurious ones. To separate the physical modes from spurious modes, a
standard tool is the stabilization diagram. The concept is briefly illus­
trated as follows: As the physical modes represent the intrinsic nature of
a structure, they are expected to appear in different model orders with
similar properties, while the spurious modes cannot appear stably in
different model orders. To obtain the diagram, the modal parameters are
estimated in a wide range of model orders and then judged as “stable” by
thresholds. In this way, the stable modes aligning vertically on the
frequency-model order plane are regarded as the physical modes. As the
stabilization axes are not always distinct and need to be judged by
skilled engineers, the core of achieving automatic operational modal
parameter identification is to establish a procedure for examining the
stabilization diagram [11–13]. That is, the analysis of a stabilization
diagram is to recognize the modes with similar characteristics. There­
fore, a variety of clustering algorithms have been widely adopted in
automated modal parameter identification nowadays [8,11,14]. Among
these are the hierarchical clustering algorithm [8,11,15] and partition
clustering methods [16,17]. The hierarchical clustering algorithm treats

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: jpyang@nycu.edu.tw (J.P. Yang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engstruct.2022.113891

Available online 2 February 2022

0141-0296/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Y. He et al. Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

all stable modes as separate clusters and then group the adjacent two The conclusions of this study are drawn in Section 5.
clusters as a new cluster. Such a procedure is repeated until the distances
between the rest clusters are larger than a user-specified threshold, 2. Review of SSI-cov/ref and uncertainty computation of modal
which indicates that the core of the hierarchical clustering algorithm is parameters
to decide the threshold. On the other hand, the partitioning methods
such as the K-means and fuzzy C-means clustering algorithms [18] tend 2.1. SSI-cov/ref
to divide the stable modes into several clusters, which have the
following drawbacks: The number of clusters needs to be specified in The discrete-time state and observation equations of a linear, time-
advance; the results are sensitive to noise points and may not be invariant structure under the white noise excitation at time step k can
deterministic due to randomly generated clustering seeds. Recently, be respectively described as follows [10]:
some strategies have been proposed to determine the optimal cluster
xk+1 = Axk + wk (1a)
number in the modal analysis. Yi et al. proposed that the cluster number
in the sparse component analysis can be determined by using the sta­
yk = Cxk + vk (1b)
tistical properties of normalized single-source-point vectors [19]. He
et al. suggested that the optimal cluster number of identified physical where xk ∈ Rn is the state vector of the structure with the model order n
modes can be determined through an iterative intelligent graph parti­ equal to two times of the number of degrees-of-freedom of the structure;
tioning algorithm [16]. The DBSCAN (density-based spatial clustering of A ∈ Rn×n is the state transition matrix; wk ∈ Rn is the process noise vector;
applications with noise) algorithm is a density-based data clustering yk ∈ Rr is the measurement vector obtained by r sensors; C ∈ Rr×n is the
algorithm, and it does not need to specify the number of clusters in observation matrix; vk ∈ Rr is the measurement noise vector.
advance and can discover clusters of different shapes and sizes from a In the operational modal parameter identification, a crucial step is to
large amount of data containing noises and outliers [20]. Thus, it might estimate the matrices A and C containing the dynamic properties of the
be suitable for grouping physical modes since the physical mode pa­ structure from the measured structural responses as they are related to
rameters naturally form several regions of high-density in the modal the mass and stiffness matrices of the structure [10]. To enhance
parameter space. computational efficiency and estimation accuracy, the r0 sensors are
Before conducting the clustering analysis, the removal of spurious selected from r sensors as the reference channels in the SSI-cov/ref al­
modes from the stabilization diagram is the most important step in the gorithm [5]. The measurement data are arranged in matrix form as
automated modal identification since the presence of spurious modes ⎡ ⎤
could lead to undesired results. To this end, many criteria have been yq+1 yq+2 ⋮ yN+q
proposed to clean the stabilization diagrams [11,15], including the 1 ⎢ yq+2 yq+3 ⋮ yN+q+1 ⎥
y+ = √̅̅̅̅ ⎢ ⎥, y −
modal assurance criterion (MAC) [21], modal phase collinearity (MPC) N⎣ ⋮ ⋮ ⋮ ⋮ ⎦
yq+p+1 yq+p+2 ⋮ yN+p+q
[22,23], and modal transfer norm (MTN) [24]. Although these criteria ⎡ ⎤
can remove spurious modes to a certain extent, they need to be used (ref) (ref) (ref)
⎢ yq yq+1 ⋮ yN+q− 1 ⎥
jointly. On the other hand, some studies have pointed out that the ⎢ ⎥
1 ⎢ y(ref) ⋮ yN+q− 2 ⎥
(ref)
estimated modal parameters are asymptotically normally distributed in = √̅̅̅̅ ⎢ q− 1 y(ref)
q ⎥ (2)
⎢ ⎥
general [25], and the standard deviations of spurious eigenfrequencies N⎢ ⋮
⎣ (ref)
⋮ ⋮ ⋮ ⎥
⎦
are typically 10–100 times larger than those of physical eigen­ y1 y(ref)
2 ⋮ y(ref)
N
frequencies [26]. Therefore, the standard deviations of the estimated
frequencies can be served as an indicator to distinguish physical modes where y+ is a matrix composed of measurement data obtained by all
from spurious modes [16,27]. sensors; y− is a matrix composed of measurement data obtained by
In this study, a procedure for automatically identifying operational
reference sensors; N is the column number of y+ and y− ; q and p are the
modal parameters of bridges based on reference-based covariance-
user-specified quantities with N + p + q denoting the total length of the
driven stochastic subspace identification algorithm (SSI-cov/ref) is
measurement data. Theoretically, N + p + q should be infinite.
proposed with the following three stages: (1) modal parameter identi­
The subspace matrix Hcov , a block Hankel matrix, is constructed from
fication and frequency uncertainty calculation using a range of model
the finite length of the measurement data given by
orders, (2) spurious modes elimination using frequency uncertainty and ⎡ ⎤
stabilization criteria, and (3) density-based clustering for distinguishing R1 R2 ⋯ Rq
physical modes. For the benchmark measurement data of bridges ⎢
Hcov = y+ (y− )T = ⎢
R2 R3 ⋯ Rq+1 ⎥ ⎥ (3)
⎣ ⋮ ⋮ ⎦
adopted in this study, the uncertainty sources might arise from mea­ ⋮ ⋱
surement noise, window length of samples, and nonstationary excita­ Rp+1 Rp+2 ⋯ Rp+q
tion. In practice, the preprocessing techniques can be adopted to ( )
partially reduce the adverse effects caused by the uncertainty sources, in which Rk = E yk yk− i ∈ Rr×r0 with k = 1, 2, ⋯, p +q are the
(ref)T

such as detrending, removing outliners, pre-filtering, resampling, etc. covariance matrices between all sensors and reference ones, and E( )
Nevertheless, due to limited research related to the application of denotes the expectation operator. It can be testified that Hcov has the
DBSCAN algorithm in automated modal parameter identification, as the following decomposition property [5,28]:
beginning of physical problem investigation, the present study considers
measurement data processing of bridge parameters, including fre­ (4)
quency, damping ratio, and mode shape. More theoretical study such as
the separation of uncertainty sources and evaluation of individual where Zq is the reversed extended controllability matrix; =
[ T T T
]
source influence on the final uncertainties of the estimated modal pa­ C (CA) T
⋯ (CA ) p is the extended observability matrix,
rameters requires further attention, which is not the focus of the present which can be determined by conducting the singular value decomposi­
study. tion (SVD) on Hcov :
This study is organized as follows: In Section 2, the SSI-cov/ref and [ ][ T ]
uncertainty computation of modal parameters are briefly reviewed. In Σ1 0n×(qr0 − n) V1
Hcov = [ U1 U0 ] (5)
Section 3, the proposed automated modal identification framework is 0[(p+1)r− n ]×n Σ0 V T0
presented in detail with an illustrative numerical example. Two real
bridges with measurement data are adopted for validation in Section 4.

2
Y. He et al.
with the following definitions:
U1 = [ u1 ⋯ un ] ∈ R(p+1)r×n
V 1 = [ v1 ⋯ vn ] ∈ Rqr0 ×n
Σ1 = diag{σ1 , ⋯, σn } ∈ Rn×n
where Σ1 is the diagonal matrix consisting of the first n non-zero singular
values of the matrix Hcov ; the column vectors of U1 and V 1 are the
corresponding left and right singular vectors. After the SVD, the noise
terms in the measurement data can be partially removed since they are
often related to the small singular values in Σ0 and are discarded. From
the definition of the extended observability matrix, C is the first r rows of
while A can be obtained by
where and denote the first and last p × r rows of
( )† denotes the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse. Once A is obtained, the
eigenvalue analysis can be conducted by using the following equation:
(A − λi In )ϕi = 0n
where λi is the ith eigenvalue of A, and ϕi ∈ Cn is the corresponding
eigenvector. λi is related to the ith frequency fj and damping ratio ξj of
the structure described by
[ ( √̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅̅) ]
λj = exp 2π − ξj ± i 1 − ξ2j fj Δt (10)
with Δt the time step length. Thus,
⃒ ( )⃒ [ ( )]
⃒ln λj ⃒ − Re ln λj
fj = , ξj = (11a-b)
2πΔt 2πfj Δt
where Re( ) denotes the real part of a complex variable; similarly, Im( )
denotes the imaginary part as will be encountered later in the text. The
observed part of the ith mode shape of the structure in the sensor lo­
cations is denoted as ψ i ∈ Cr , which can be calculated by
ψ i = Cϕi
It is important to point out that the SSI-cov/ref algorithm only needs
the covariance matrices between the output sensors and a limited set of
reference sensors, as can be seen from Eq. (3), instead of the covariance
matrices between all outputs. Consequently, the computational effi­
ciency of the algorithm is ensured due to the reduction of matrix
dimension.
2.2. Soft and hard criteria
The model order of the structure is generally unknown in the oper­
ational modal parameter identification. Nevertheless, to avoid the bias
in the modal parameter estimation and allow the SSI algorithm to cap­
ture all dynamic characteristics of the structure from measurement data,
a wide range of model orders n are often selected for modal parameter
identification as described in Eqs. (5)–(7). In addition to the incorrect
specification of model order, other reasons can blur the identified modes
such as measurement noise, nonstationary excitation [29], and limited
measurement data. To this end, the stabilization diagram is introduced
to eliminate the spurious modes [26].
To construct such a diagram, the modal parameters identified from
the current system of order j are compared with those identified from the
previous system of order k; then, a “stable” mode is judged, provided
that the differences between two consecutive sets of modal parameters
Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891
are smaller than the thresholds. As the physical modes represent the
(6)
intrinsic nature of the structure, they are expected to appear in different
model orders with similar characteristics. In contrast, the modal pa­
rameters of spurious modes may vary significantly between two suc­
(7a) cessive model orders; hence, they can be largely removed by comparing
the variations of modal parameters with the tolerable thresholds.
(7b) Thence, the physical modes can align vertically to form several stabili­
zation axes on the frequency-model order plane, while the spurious
(7c) modes are randomly distributed on this plane. The commonly adopted
measures of relative difference for estimating frequency, damping ratio,
and mode shape are defined as follows:
( ) | fj − fk |
d fj , fk = ( ⃒ ⃒ ⃒ ⃒) < δf (13a)
max ⃒ fj ⃒, ⃒ fk ⃒
( ) |ξj − ξk |
d ξj , ξk = ( ⃒ ⃒ ⃒ ⃒) < δ ξ (13b)
max ⃒ξj ⃒, ⃒ξk ⃒
(8) ⃒{ }
⃒ H
⃒2
⃒
( ) ( ) ⃒ ψ j {ψ k }⃒
d ψ j , ψ k = 1 − MAC ψ j , ψ k = 1 − ({ }H { } )( ) < δψ
; ψj ψj {ψ k }H {ψ k }
(13c)
where δf , δξ , and δψ denote the tolerances of frequency, damping ratio,
(9) and mode shape, respectively; MAC denotes the modal assurance cri­
terion with explicit expression in Eq. 13(c); ( )H denotes the Hermitian
transpose. In real applications, δf and δψ are often specified between
0.01 and 0.05, while δξ is specified as a relatively larger number such as
0.1 due to high scattering of the estimated damping ratios.
The three sub-equations in Eq. (13) belong to the so-called soft
criteria, which generate a series of values without using specific deter­
mined values to discriminate spurious modes from a statistical stand­
point. There are other soft criteria, to name just a few: The modal phase
collinearity (MPC) measures the complexity of the identified mode
shape [22]; the modal transfer norm (MTN) measures the energy
contribution of a mode to the total response [24]. In contrast, there are
hard criteria determining whether an identified mode is a spurious mode
from the physical perspective such as physical values or strict defini­
tions. For example, if the damping ratio of an identified mode is outside
the range of 0–0.2, this mode can be directly judged as a spurious mode
since the identified damping ratio is not physically realistic for a civil
(12) structure; nevertheless, for an identified damping ratio lies within such a
range, it is considered as a possible physical mode while it needs to be
further judged by other criteria. In the present study, the hard criterion
for damping ratio is set as 0 < ξ < 0.1. As the soft criteria cover a wider
range in terms of identification, both criteria can be used simultaneously
from programming side.
2.3. Uncertainty computation for estimated modal parameters
The previous studies have shown that the standard variances of the
spurious modes are generally much larger than those of the physical
ones [26]. Thus, the standard variances of the estimated modes can be
served as a tool to discriminate physical modes from spurious ones
[16,27,30,31]. In the following, the computation of covariance is briefly
reviewed [10,27].
To calculate the uncertainty of modal parameters, the strategy in­
̂ cov and the derivation of un­
cludes the calculation of uncertainty of H
certainty propagation laws. In Subsection 2.1, the subspace matrix Hcov
is constructed to calculate the modal parameters. However, as described
̂ cov . The
in Subsection 2.2, only the estimate of Hcov is obtained, i.e. H
uncertainty of Ĥ cov first propagates to , then propagates to A and
C, and finally propagates to the modal parameters fj , ξj , and ψ i .
In the calculation of uncertainty of H ̂ cov , the components of H ̂ cov are
3
Y. He et al. Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

Fig. 1. Flowchart of the proposed automated modal identification framework.

regarded as random variables to calculate the corresponding covariance

̂ Hcov = cov(vec( H ̂ cov ))
matrix. For this sake, the data matrices given in Eq. (2) are split into nb Σ
column blocks and normalized by the individual column number Nb so 1 ∑nb ( ( cov )
= vec Ĥ
that nb (nb − 1) j=1 j

√̅̅̅̅ + √̅̅̅̅̅̅[ + ] √̅̅̅̅ − √̅̅̅̅̅̅[ ] )( ( ) )T

N y = Nb y1 y+ 2 ⋯ y+ nb , N y = Nb y−1 y−2 ⋯ y−nb − vec( Ĥ cov ) vec H ̂ cov − vec( H
̂ cov ) (17)
j
(14)
where vec( ) denotes the operator of vectorization [32] stacking the
with nb × Nb = N. Each pair of the split column blocks gives an estimate
columns of the matrix H ̂ cov on top of one another; cov( ) denotes the
̂ cov , i.e. H
of H ̂ cov , given by
j
covariance operator.
( )T To derive the laws of uncertainty propagation, the first-order
̂ cov
H = y+ −
(15)
j j yj perturbation is adopted [33]. Let Y be a function of the matrix X, i.e.
Y = f(X), then the perturbation on X(i.e. ΔX) can propagate to Y as
̂ cov is the average value of estimates defined as
Consequently, H
denoted by , where denotes the
sensitivity of vec(Y) with respect to vec(X). After applying the first-order
∑nb
̂ cov = 1
H ̂ cov
H (16)
nb j=1 j Taylor expansion [27,33], the covariance matrix of the vectorized Y, i.e.
cov(vec(Y)), is calculated from the covariance matrix of the vectorized
̂ cov is defined by the
The covariance matrix of the vectorized H X, i.e. cov(vec(Y)), by
following:
(18)

Similarly, the covariance of the estimated modal parameters can be

calculated by

(19a)

(19b)

4
Y. He et al.
Fig. 2. A simply-supported beam with white noise excitation.
Fig. 3. Stabilization diagram for the simply-supported beam obtained by sta­
bilization criteria: δf = 0.02, δξ = 0.1, δψ = 0.02, and 0 < ξ < 0.1. The blue
dots stand for stable modes while the grey lines denote ANPSD.
The detailed derivations and expressions of the above sensitivity
matrices are referred to Refs. [10,27], in which Döhler and Mevel pro­
posed a series of optimization strategies to improve the computational
efficiency during the derivation of the above sensitivity matrices [27].
Therefore, the uncertainty computation can be completed in a short
time. In the following study, only the standard deviations of the esti­
mated frequencies are considered. If the standard deviation of the esti­
mated frequency of a mode is very large, then this mode is judged as
Fig. 4. Cleared stabilization diagrams for simply-supported beam obtained by (a) frequency uncertainty criterion: c.v.f. = 0.02; (b) commonly-used criteria: c.v.f. =
0.02, δf = 0.02, δξ = 0.1, δψ = 0.02, and 0 < ξ < 0.1.
5
Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891
“spurious”. In this study, this criterion is called the frequency uncertainty
criterion, which is of particular interest in that it cannot only remove the
spurious modes but also guarantee the final estimated modal parameters
with desired statistical reliability.
3. Automated modal parameter identification
As illustrated in Fig. 1, the procedure for automatically identifying
modal parameters consists of the following three stages: Stage 1: the
modal parameters are estimated by using the SSI-cov/ref algorithm in a
wide range of model orders. Meanwhile, the standard deviations of the
identified frequencies are calculated on the basis of uncertainty
computation as introduced in Subsection 2.3. Stage 2: the frequency
uncertainty criterion together with the soft and hard criteria described
in Subsection 2.2 are adopted to remove the spurious modes. Stage 3: the
DBSCAN algorithm is employed to group the identified physical modes
and detect outliers, in which a representative mode in each cluster is
selected as the final estimated physical mode. The proposed method will
be illustrated in detail through the following numerical examples.
3.1. Model description
As shown in Fig. 2, a simply-supported beam of length 10 m, mass per
unit length 11.26 kg/m, and flexural rigidity 5.05 × 105 N∙m2 is
considered. In the finite element analysis, the bridge is divided into 10
in-plane beam elements with the output locations labeled in sequence (i.
e. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and the damping matrix is constructed by
D = 0.603M +5.52 × 10− 5 K with M and K the mass and stiffness
matrices of the beam. The first five theoretical undamped natural fre­
quencies with damping ratios in brackets are listed as follows: 3.33 Hz
(0.015), 13.30 Hz (0.008), 29.93 Hz (0.001), 53.207 Hz (0.014), and
83.137 Hz (0.015). A vertical force of white noise is applied at node 2
with the magnitude of 10 N and the time duration of 100 sec. The dy­
namic response of the bridge is calculated by Newmark-β method with
Y. He et al. Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

β = 0.25 and γ = 0.5 for unconditional stability, and the time step is
0.001 sec.
The vertical accelerations of the left five nodes (nodes 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) of
the bridge are selected as output signals, in which the second node is
selected as the reference channel since it is not the node of the first five
mode shapes, and the responses of these five modes will show up at this
node. After the assignment, r = 5 and r0 = 1. To simulate the mea­
surement noise, the calculated acceleration of the bridge is added by the
zero-mean white noise as
unoi = ucal + Ep Nw σ cal (20)

where unoi is the noise-polluted acceleration; ucal is the calculated ac­

celeration; Ep is the noise level set as 0.1 in this example; Nw is the
Gaussian noise with zero mean and unit standard deviation; σcal is the
standard deviation of the calculated acceleration. The outputs are first
filtered through a digital low-pass filter with a cut-off frequency of 100
Hz and then resampled at 200 Hz before the modal parameter identifi­
cation; consequently, each output channel contains 20,000 data points.
Fig. 5. Clustered physical modes of simply-supported beam on the frequency-
In the SSI-cov/ref algorithm, p and q are 59 and 60, respectively, which
damping ratio plane.
satisfies p + 1 = q as recommended by Ref. [34]. To construct the sta­
bilization diagram, the model orders are in the range of n = 2–50 with an
1–1.5%. As there exists no theoretical study on deciding the value of c.v.
increment of 2. To compute frequency uncertainty, nb is designed as 100.
f., to the best of authors’ knowledge, the trade-off in choosing c.v.f.
should concern both the reliability of results and observability of modes.
Since the measurement data might not always be of high quality, c.v.f. is
3.2. Elimination of spurious modes
assigned to be a little larger (i.e. 2–5%) in the following study to avoid
missing the weakly excited modes.
Fig. 3 shows the stabilization diagram obtained by the following
Fig. 4(b) displays the results obtained by further cleaning up of Fig. 4
commonly-used criteria: δf = 0.02, δξ = 0.1, δψ = 0.02, and
(a) using the commonly-used stabilization criteria, from which it is
0 < ξ < 0.1. It is observed that the five stabilization axes (presented by
observed that only two spurious modes remain. On the whole, applying
blue dots) are distinguishable by eyes. Nevertheless, there also exist
the frequency uncertainty criterion and commonly-used stabilization
spurious modes not aligning vertically. This indicates that the
criteria jointly can reach good results in removing the spurious modes.
commonly-used stabilization criteria alone are insufficient to eliminate
the spurious modes, and more spurious modes need to be removed
before conducting physical mode clustering. As a comparison, the 3.3. Modified density-based clustering algorithm
average normalized power spectral density (ANPSD) [35,36] integrating
the information of all measurement channels is superimposed on Fig. 3 To obtain the final identified results, the last stage is to group the
to demonstrate the spectral characteristics of the measured signal re­ remaining modes into several clusters and select a representative mode
sponses, which is defined as for each cluster. More specifically, the modal parameters of the same
physical mode are densely distributed in the modal parametric space
1∑r PSD(f )i
ANPSD(f ) = ∑N0 ( ) (21) since they have similar properties, and vice versa. In this study, a
r i=1
j PSD fj i density-based data grouping algorithm, the DBSCAN algorithm, is
adopted. The detailed implementation of the algorithm can be referred
where r is the number of the measurement channels; PSD(f)i is the power
to Ref. [20]. For present purpose, the modified DBSCAN algorithm in the
spectral density of the ith channel; N0 is the number of data
proposed framework are illustrated with key considerations as follows:
points of PSD of the ith channel. After superimposing Eq. (21) on Fig. 3,
five distinct peaks of the ANPSD (presented by grey lines) are observed,
(1) Defining the distance metric for modal similarity measurement.
which match very well with the stabilization axes and correspond to the
The modal parametric space involves three parameters such as
first five frequencies of the bridge.
frequency, damping ratio, and mode shape. If two modes corre­
Fig. 4(a) shows the stabilization diagram obtained by using the fre­
spond to the same physical mode, the above three parameters will
quency uncertainty criterion only, i.e. removal of the modes whose
be very close to each other. Due to high scattering of the esti­
standard deviations are larger than 2% of the identified frequencies. In
mated modal damping ratios and the same value possibly repre­
this figure, each symbol (denoted by a blue dot with error bars) repre­
sented by different modes, a pairwise non-dimensional distance
sents the value of fi ±σ fi , where fi is the identified frequency and σfi is the
between two modes is defined by using the frequency and mode
corresponding standard deviation. Apparently, the frequency uncer­
shape in this study:
tainty criterion is powerful in eliminating the spurious modes since there
( )
remain only four spurious modes. Nevertheless, it also removes some of fi − fj
the physical modes. In statistics, the ratio of standard deviation to mean di− j = + 1 − MACi− j (22)
fj
value is defined as the coefficient of variation. For clarity, the threshold of
the frequency uncertainty criterion is denoted as c.v.f. throughout the
content. In this example, c.v.f. = 2%. As the removed physical modes (2) Specifying the minimum number of modes minPts clustering in a
have larger statistical uncertainty in comparison with the remaining “dense” region. This is one of the two parameters that the
ones in general, they are removed to avoid worse estimates of modal DBSCAN algorithm requires the user to specify. To avoid falsely
parameters. On the other hand, if the frequency criterion is set to be too treating the weakly excited high-order modes as outliers, minPts
strict (i.e. a very small c.v.f.), only a few of physical modes can be left or should be a small value. In this study, minPts = 5.
even the weakly excited physical modes are removed. In the literature (3) Specifying the searching radius eps(ε) of an identified physical
[16,27,30], c.v.f. is often specified as a small value in the range of mode in the neighborhood of another scattering mode. After the

6
Y. He et al. Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

Fig. 6. Clustered frequencies and damping ratios obtained by (a) K-means clustering algorithm; (b) fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm.

scattering of the identified damping ratios as physical modes can still be

Table 1
observed, especially for the first mode. This observation testifies that the
Comparison of the estimated and theoretical frequencies (damping ratios) of the
damping ratio is not a good modal parameter to cluster physical modes.
simply-supported beam.
As a comparison, the K-means and fuzzy C-means clustering algo­
Mode 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th rithms are adopted to group the frequencies and damping ratios with the
Theoretical 3.33 13.30 29.93 53.21 81.14 pre-specified cluster number equal to five, and the results are displayed
(0.015) (0.008) (0.001) (0.014) (0.015) in Fig. 6. Apparently, these algorithms cannot distinguish the two
Estimated 3.33 13.29 29.86 52.85 81.98
spurious modes from the physical modes. It should be noted that if the
(0.015) (0.005) (0.005) (0.010) (0.014)
Relative error 0.00 0.07 0.23 0.68 1.04 frequencies and damping ratios in the centroids of clusters are used as
(%) (0.00) (37.50) (4 0 0) (21.42) (6.67) the final estimated parameters, they will be seriously affected by the
remaining spurious modes in this regard.
The theoretical and representative frequencies (damping ratios) are
stage of cleaning spurious modes, the modal parameters (i.e. listed in Table 1, from which high accuracy of the estimated frequencies
frequencies and mode shapes) of the same physical mode are is observed while this may not be the case for the estimated damping
already very close to each other; thus, eps should be a small value ratios. Although the relative error of the estimated third-order damping
to group physical modes. In this study, eps is suggested to be 0.02, ratio is quite large, the magnitudes of the estimated and theoretical
which is also the same as the cutoff distance recommended by values are very close. Fig. 7 compares the estimated and theoretical
Ref. [8] for hierarchical clustering of physical modes. ( )
mode shapes, in which the latter are expressed as sin jπlx with j the
To assign a mode to a cluster containing physical modes, the
mode number, l the length of the bridge (l = 10 m) [37]. Obviously, good
neighborhood within eps of this mode must contain at least minPts
agreement between the estimated and theoretical mode shapes is
modes, or this mode lying within the neighborhood within eps of another
observed.
mode satisfies the conditions of eps and minPts. After the stage of
cleaning spurious modes, the existing spurious modes are very few and
4. Validation of benchmark data
often randomly distributed in the modal parametric space. Conse­
quently, they are distinguished as outliers (noise points) without being
The proposed method will be validated by the benchmark mea­
falsely grouped in the clusters of physical modes by the DBSCAN algo­
surement data from the two real bridges. The data of the first bridge are
rithm. Hence, the DBSCAN algorithm is more robust to the interference
provided by a research team from Tufts University while those of the
caused by the spurious modes as compared with other clustering algorithms.
second bridge are the open measurement data recently provided by a
In this study, the final representative mode of each cluster is chosen
research team from Kyoto University.
as the one with the median value of the identified damping ratios, as
suggested by Ref. [11]. If the number of the modes in a cluster is even,
then the representative mode is chosen to be the one with a smaller 4.1. Example 1: Dowling Hall Footbridge
damping ratio in the middle pair of the sorted damping ratios. Such a
selection can guarantee that the final identified damping ratios are less As shown in Fig. 8(a), the Dowling Hall Footbridge is a pedestrian
affected by the variation of damping ratios within the clusters. bridge located on the campus of Tufts University in Medford, MA, which
As shown in Fig. 5, the clustered physical modes for the simply- is a two-span steel frame bridge linking the main campus and student
supported beam are finally plotted on the frequency-damping ratio services offices. Its length and width are 44 m and 3.7 m, respectively.
plane, in which the representative modes (their modal parameters are There are eight accelerometers installed in pairs on both sides of the
the final estimated results) are denoted as crosses ( × ). By observation, bridge in order to capture the torsional motion of the bridge under
the five physical clusters corresponding to the first five modes of the ambient vibrations, and the layout of accelerometers is displayed in
bridge are distinctly obtained. Especially, the two outliers of spurious Fig. 8(b). The bridge is designed to be flexible during the excitation of
modes are successfully distinguished from the physical modes without pedestrians or winds, and its vibration can be even sensed by people
being falsely grouped into the physical clusters. Nevertheless, the large [38]. The continuous monitoring of the bridge took 17 weeks from

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Y. He et al. Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

Fig. 7. Comparison of the estimated and theoretical mode shapes of the simply-supported beam: (a)-(e) correspond to the 1st-5th modes.

Fig. 8. Dowling Hall Footbridge: (a) photo; (b) locations of accelerometers (adopted from Ref. [38]).

January 2010 to May 2010 for the research team to collect the data. The
original sampling rate was 2048 Hz, but the measurement data were
downsampled to 128 Hz by the test personnel. After some post-
processing, the measurement data were made public on the website of
the School of Engineering [39]. More detailed information about the
acquisition system and test data analysis can be found in Refs. [38,40].
The data to be analyzed by this study were measured on January 7,
2010. In the measurement duration of 267 sec., each channel has 34,144
data points. The accelerometers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7 are selected as the
reference channels. In the SSI-cov/ref algorithm, p and q are assigned as
50 and 51, respectively. To construct the stabilization diagram, the
model order is chosen to range from n = 2 to n = 100 with the increment
of 2. To compute frequency uncertainty, nb is assigned as 100. Fig. 9(a) is
the stabilization diagram after using the frequency uncertainty criterion,
i.e. removal of the identified modes having standard deviations larger
than 2% of the identified frequencies. In this subfigure, the ANPSD is
also given for comparison. It is observed that almost all spurious modes
are removed except one spurious mode, which confirms that the

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Y. He et al. Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

Fig. 9. Stabilization diagram of Dowling Hall Footbridge obtained by (a) frequency uncertainty criterion: c.v.f. = 0.02; (b) commonly-used criteria: c.v.f. = 0.02, δf =
0.02, δξ = 0.1, δψ = 0.02, and 0 < ξ < 0.1.

Fig. 10. Clustered physical modes of Dowling Hall Footbridge on the Fig. 11. Path of cluster numbers by iteration for the estimated frequencies
frequency-damping ratio plane. shown in Fig. 9(b).

frequency uncertainty criterion is very powerful in eliminating spurious

modes. Fig. 9(b) shows the stabilization diagram obtained after the Table 2
modes in Fig. 8(a) further cleaned by using the commonly-used stabi­ Comparison of the estimated frequencies of the footbridge obtained by different
lization criteria (i.e. δf = 0.02, δξ = 0.1, δψ = 0.02, and 0 < ξ < 0.1), methods.
from which the complete removal of residual spurious mode in Fig. 9(a) Mode Baseline in [38] (Hz) Proposed method (Hz) Relative error (%)
is observed. 1st 4.68 4.62 1.28
The rest physical modes in Fig. 9(b) are grouped using the DBSCAN 2nd 5.99 6.04 0.83
algorithm with minPts = 5 and eps = 0.02, and the results are shown in 3rd 7.16 7.22 0.84
Fig. 10. By using the proposed method, the first six modes of the foot­ 4th 8.94 8.95 0.11
5th 13.19 13.24 0.38
bridge are distinctly clustered and no outliers are observed. In partic­ 6th 13.73 13.47 1.89
ular, the last two modes are closely spaced modes with frequencies
13.24 Hz and 13.47 Hz, respectively [38]. The strong ability of the
proposed method in identifying the closely spaced modes is therefore same physical mode will exhibit higher similarity (i.e. having stronger
demonstrated. internal link). The optimal cluster number can be determined by the
In Ref. [16], the adaptive fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm pro­ following three steps: (1) Computing measurement of link strength by
posed in Refs. [41,42] was adopted to determine the optimal cluster grouping the estimated modal frequencies by the fuzzy C-means clus­
number in the analysis of physical mode clustering. The basic idea of this tering algorithm with a range of cluster number to generate the so-called
algorithm is that the estimated modal parameters corresponding to the cumulative adjacency matrix. (2) Iteratively conducting minus 1

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Y. He et al. Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

Fig. 12. The first six normalized mode shapes of Dowling Hall Footbridge: (a)-(f) correspond to the 1st-6th modes. The black and white circles denote the nodes of
the bridge deck at the supports and the positions of the accelerometers, respectively.

operation on the non-zero elements of the cumulative adjacency matrix
until all of them become zeros. (3) Finding the optimal cluster number
from the iteration-cluster number graph, i.e. the cluster number appearing
most frequently. For the estimated bridge frequencies as shown in Fig. 9
(b), the corresponding path of cluster numbers by iteration is displayed
in Fig. 11. Obviously, this algorithm fails to give a unique optimal cluster
number because both cluster numbers 6 and 14 appear most often (i.e.
four times) in this example. In contrast, the DBSCAN clustering algo­
rithm generates a unique and deterministic result.
A representative mode of each cluster is chosen to be the one with the
median value of the identified damping ratios. In Table 2, the estimated
frequencies obtained by the present method are compared with the data
[38], in which only small differences are observed between these two
results. It is pointed out that no comparison is made for the estimated
bridge damping ratios as the estimated bridge damping ratios vary
largely among different measurement data [38]. The identified mode
shapes are depicted in Fig. 12, where the first, second, fifth, and sixth
modes are the vertical flexural modes while the third and fourth modes
are the torsional modes.
4.2. Example 2: Old ADA bridge
The Old ADA bridge is a simply-supported steel truss bridge located
in the Nara Prefecture, Japan, as shown in Fig. 13(a). Its main span

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Y. He et al. Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

Fig. 13. Old ADA bridge: (a) photo; (b) locations of accelerometers. (adopted from Ref. [44]).

Fig. 14. Stabilization diagram obtained by (a) frequency uncertainty criterion: c.v.f. = 0.05; (b) commonly-used criteria: c.v.f. = 0.05, δf = 0.02, δξ = 0.1, δψ =
0.02, and 0 < ξ < 0.1.

length and width are 59.2 m and 3.6 m, respectively. The bridge was
constructed in 1959 and demolished in 2012. Before the removal of this
bridge, a series of ambient and vehicle-induced vibration tests were
conducted to investigate the effects of artificially induced damages on
the changes of modal parameters. There were five scenarios subjected to
different damages, in which the first scenario had no artificially induced
damage and was regarded as the reference in comparison with the other
four damage-involved scenarios. The eight accelerometers were
installed on the bridge deck to record the dynamic responses of the
bridge. To reach better measurement resolution of damage-induced
modal parameters, five accelerometers were installed on the damaged
side while only three accelerometers were deployed on the non-
damaged side. The locations of accelerometers are shown in Fig. 13

Table 3
Comparison of the estimated frequencies of the Old ADA bridge.
Mode Ref. [43] (Hz) Proposed method (Hz) Relative error (%)

1st 2.975 3.025 1.68

Fig. 15. Clustered physical modes of Old ADA bridge on the frequency- 2nd 6.865 6.892 0.39
damping ratio plane. 3rd 9.629 9.671 0.44
4th 10.547 10.562 0.14
5th 13.428 13.535 0.80

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Y. He et al. Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891

Fig. 16. The normalized mode shapes of the Old ADA bridge: (a)-(e) correspond to the 1st-5th modes.

Fig. 17. (a) Stabilization diagram obtained by the criteria: c.v.f. = 0.02, δf = 0.02, δξ = 0.1, δψ = 0.02, and 0 < ξ < 0.1; (b) clustered physical modes on the
frequency-damping ratio plane.

(b). More details regarding the experimental process and test data The sampling rate is 200 Hz, and each channel has 75,964 data points.
analysis can be found in Refs. [43,44]. To construct the stabilization diagram, p and q are assigned as 59 and 60,
The measurement data adopted in this study were obtained from the respectively; the model orders in consideration range from n = 2 to n =
ambient vibration test (three-time tests), the undamaged scenario [44]. 60 with an increment of 2. The accelerometers 2, 3, and 4 are chosen as

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Y. He et al.
the reference channels. To compute frequency uncertainty, nb is
designed as 100. The frequency range of interest is from 0 to 14 Hz.
Fig. 14(a) shows the stabilization diagram obtained after applying the
frequency uncertainty criterion, i.e. removing the identified frequency
modes with standard deviations larger than 5% of the estimated bridge
frequencies. Clearly, most of the spurious modes have been cleaned up
by using the frequency uncertainty criterion. The remaining spurious
modes are further cleaned up by using the commonly-used stabilization
criteria as shown in Fig. 13(b). After this procedure, the spurious modes
have been completely removed, in particular, with the five distinct
stabilization axes formed by the existing physical modes.
After the cleanup of spurious modes, the remaining physical modes
are grouped by using the DBSCAN algorithm with minPts = 5 and eps =
0.02. The clustered physical modes are shown in Fig. 15, and five
clusters are clearly generated and no outliers are observed. The repre­
sentative mode of each cluster is chosen to be the one having the median
value of the estimated damping ratios, as denoted by the symbol cross
(×) depicted in Fig. 15. The identified frequencies obtained by the
proposed method are compared with the reference results given in
Ref. [43] as summarized in Table 3. Apparently, the relative errors are
very small, which indicates that the two results are in great agreement.
The corresponding normalized mode shapes are shown in Fig. 16, and
the first five modes are vertical bending modes.
An interesting phenomenon is observed in Fig. 14, in which the 2 σ f
range [f3 − σf3 , f3 +σf3 ] of the third mode is wider than those of the others,
i.e. the frequency uncertainty for the third mode is higher. As shown in
Fig. 17, by using c.v.f. = 0.02 to eliminate the spurious modes, only one
pole is left for the third mode, and the DBSCAN clustering algorithm
treats it as an outlier. In other words, the third mode will be failed to be
extracted. The above observation enlightens us that to avoid modal loss,
it is advisable to adopt a larger c.v.f. in the initial analysis of the test
data.
5. Conclusions
In this study, a three-stage framework for automated modal identi­
fication of bridge parameters is proposed with the following merits: The
unsupervised data clustering algorithm doesn’t require the users to
specify the cluster number in advance, and it remains robust even sub­
ject to the interference of spurious modes. The frequency uncertainty
criterion can remove the majority of spurious modes while it guarantees
the final identified modal parameters with desired statistical reliability.
From this study, it is first found that the modified DBSCAN algorithm is
very suitable for automated physical mode clustering of bridges. In
addition to the bridge structures, the proposed framework can be further
applied to other civil structures. The procedure of the proposed frame­
work is first illustrated by using a simply-supported bridge with simu­
lated data and then validated by benchmark data obtained from the on-
site measurement of two real bridges. The feasibility of the proposed
framework is therefore demonstrated.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Yi He: Methodology, Software, Investigation, Writing – original
draft, Funding acquisition. Judy P. Yang: Methodology, Conceptuali­
zation, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing,
Supervision, Funding acquisition. Yi-Feng Li: Methodology.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
13
Engineering Structures 255 (2022) 113891
Acknowledgments
The supports of this study by the following agencies are acknowl­
edged: Chongqing Science and Technology Commission with Grant Nos.
cstc2020yszx-jscxX0002, cstc2019yszx-jcyjX0001, and cstc2018jcyj-
yszxX0013; Grant No. K2019G036 by China State Railway Group Co.,
Ltd; Grant No. MOST 110-2628-E-A49-005 by Ministry of Science and
Technology, Taiwan.
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