An equation-discovery approach to earthquake-ground-motion prediction

In active seismic regions an earthquake’s peak ground acceleration (PGA) is required information when designing a building. In this study we employ the state-of-the-art, Lagramge, equation-discovery system to induce an equation that is suitable for modeling the PGA and investigate its applicability. In contrast to traditional modeling techniques the Lagramge system does not presume the structure of the equation and then identify the parameter values; instead, it finds the equation’s structure as well. From the large amount of background knowledge on earthquake engineering we formalize a context-free grammar, which is then used as a guideline for the equation-building procedure. The PF-L data set used for the experiments is taken from the study of Peruš and Fajfar (2010), which is based on the data sets of Chiou et al. (2008) in the project Next Generation Attenuation of Ground Motion and the study of Akkar and Bommer (2010). The best model derived from the grammar is then quantitatively and qualitatively evaluated and compared. The presented results support the proposal to use an equation-discovery tool as an aid to the PGA modeling work and to potentially contribute new knowledge to the field of earthquake engineering.