Recent advances in sensor technologies and data acquisition systems opened up the era of big data in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). Data-driven methods based on statistical pattern recognition provide outstanding opportunities to implement a long-term SHM strategy, by exploiting measured vibration data. However, their main limitation, due to big data or high-dimensional features, is linked to the complex and time-consuming procedures for feature extraction and/or statistical decision-making. To cope with this issue, in this article we propose a strategy based on autoregressive moving average (ARMA) modeling for feature extraction, and on an innovative hybrid divergence-based method for feature classification. Data relevant to a cable-stayed bridge are accounted for to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. The results show that the offered hybrid divergence-based method, in conjunction with ARMA modeling, succeeds in detecting damage in cases strongly characterized by big data.
This article proposes an innovative unsupervised learning method for early damage detection and long‐term structural health monitoring of civil structures under environmental variability. This method consists of three main parts including a novelty detector based on kernel null Foley–Sammon transform (KNFST), a practical approach to choosing an optimal Gaussian kernel parameter, and a probabilistic method for the threshold estimation. The crux of KNFST is to map all original samples to a kernel feature space and project the kernelized features into a single point in a null space. The proposed threshold estimation method exploits the extreme value theory, the generalized Pareto distribution, and the peak‐over‐threshold. The major contribution of this article is to propose an innovative novelty detection method by a one‐class kernel null space algorithm and a probabilistic threshold estimation approach. Dealing with the problem of environmental variations and estimating a reliable alarming threshold are the main advantages of the proposed method. The effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method are validated by the Wooden Bridge in a laboratory environment and the full‐scale Z24 Bridge. Results demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised learning method highly succeeds in detecting damage even under strong environmental variations.
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