Prediction of local site influence on seismic vulnerability using machine learning: A study of the 6 February 2023 Turkiye earthquakes

Abstract

This study uses machine learning to analyze local seismic features' influence on damage from the 6 February 2023 T & uuml;rkiye Earthquakes.The input features include Vs(30) (the average shear wave velocity to a depth of 30 m), f(0) (the predominant frequency of the site), A(0) (HVSR ratio for the site), and EBd (engineering bedrock depth), along with the target feature of damage status for 44 locations. Machine learning involves Random Forest (RF), K-nearest Neighbor (KNN), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Trees (DT), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and Multilayer Perceptron (MP) algorithms. Also, five-fold cross-validation is employed to acquire suitable hyperparameters, enhancing its efficacy in modeling small sample sets. RF emerged as the most effective in whole performance metrics, presenting recall scores for damage and no damage conditions respectively by a 94% and 92% ratio and achieving a damage status prediction accuracy of 93%. All remaining algorithms also exhibited remarkable performance, reaching a minimum accuracy of 89% by DT, and recall score for no damage condition with 80% by MP and damage condition with 88% by SVM and SGD. The outcomes definitively designate EBd as the most crucial parameter, attributing 52% importance to its role in building damage occurrence within the study area. In contrast, significance values were determined as 24%, 18%, and 6% for f(0), Vs(30) and A(0) respectively. These findings underscore the importance of demonstrating that initial damage estimation in high seismic hazard zones can be effectively carried out using machine learning approaches through seismic-based local site parameters.