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Ice gouging is one of the critical threats to the subsea pipelines crossing the Arctic and neighboring shallow waters. The burial of subsea pipelines is considered a viable solution to protect them against ice gouging attacks. The pipeline is usually buried below the deepest recorded ice gouges in that specific geographical location but is still threatened by subgouge soil deformation that is extended down the ice tip due to the shear resistance of the seabed soil. Determination of the subgouge soil deformations is a challenging design aspect that usually requires costly experimental and numerical studies to ensure the structural integrity of the buried pipeline against ice gouging. In this paper, an alternative and cost-effective methodology has been proposed using the group method of data handling (GMDH) to simulate the horizontal and vertical subgouge soil deformation profiles in the sandy seabed. Ten GMDH models (GMDH 1 to GMDH 10) were defined by using the governing input parameters comprising the soil depth ratio, the gouge depth ratio, the shear strength of seabed soil, the attack angle, the frontal berm height ratio, the horizontal and vertical loads, and the ice dynamics. The results from the best GMDH models were compared with the artificial neural network and empirical approaches, which showed a robust performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]