Steel sheet piling, typically used for retaining structures in the United States, is a potential alternative for use as the primary component in low-volume road (LVR) bridge substructures. To investigate the viability of sheet pile abutments, a demonstration project was performed in Black Hawk County, Iowa. The project involved construction of a 40 ft single-span bridge utilizing axially loaded...

High Dimension Low Sample Size statistical analysis is becoming increasingly important in a wide range of applied contexts. In such situations, it is seen that the appealing discrimination method called the Support Vector Machine can be improved. The revealing concept is “data piling” at the margin. This leads naturally to the development of “Distance Weighted Discrimination,” which also is bas...

We study the influence of solid friction on the structure of the force network sustaining a regular bidimensional granular piling. We show how the mechanical equations describing local equilibrium may couple naturally with a stochastic variable. A Monte Carlo method is designed to extract the force networks satisfying static equilibrium conditions. A statistical ensemble is constructed and we s...

In a binary discrimination problem, a linear classifier finds a linear hyperplane that separates two classes by partitioning the data space. Especially in a High Dimension Low Sample Size (HDLSS) setting, there are linear separating hyperplanes such that the projections of the training data points onto their normal direction vectors are identically zero, or some non-zero constant. Of interest i...