Application of Feedforward Neural Network and SPT Results in the Estimation of Seismic Soil Liquefaction Triggering

Soil liquefaction is a dangerous phenomenon for structures that lose their shear strength and soil resistance, occurring during seismic shocks such as earthquakes or sudden stress conditions. Determining the liquefaction and nonliquefaction capacity of soil is a difficult but necessary job when constructing structures in earthquake zones. Usually, the possibility of soil liquefaction is determined by laboratory tests on soil samples subjected to dynamic loads, and this is time-consuming and costly. Therefore, this study focuses on the development of a machine learning model called a Forward Neural Network (FNN) to estimate the activation of soil liquefaction under seismic condition. The database is collected from the published literature, including 270 liquefaction cases and 216 nonliquefaction case histories under different geological conditions and earthquakes used for construction and confirming the model. The model is built and optimized for hyperparameters based on a technique known as random search (RS). Then, the L2 regularization technique is used to solve the overfitting problem of the model. The analysis results are compared with a series of empirical formulas as well as some popular machine learning (ML) models. The results show that the RS-L2-FNN model successfully predicts soil liquefaction with an accuracy of 90.33% on the entire dataset and an average accuracy of 88.4% after 300 simulations which takes into account the random split of the datasets. Compared with the empirical formulas as well as other machine learning models, the RS-L2-FNN model shows superior performance and solves the overfitting problem of the model. In addition, the global sensitivity analysis technique is used to detect the most important input characteristics affecting the activation prediction of liquefied soils. The results show that the corrected SPT resistance (N₁)₆₀ is the most important input variable, affecting the determination of the liquefaction capacity of the soil. This study provides a powerful tool that allows rapid and accurate prediction of liquefaction based on several basic soil properties.