An investigation of feature selection methods for soil liquefaction prediction based on tree-based ensemble algorithms using AdaBoost, gradient boosting, and XGBoost.

Previous major earthquake events have revealed that soils susceptible to liquefaction are one of the factors causing significant damages to the structures. Therefore, accurate prediction of the liquefaction phenomenon is an important task in earthquake engineering. Over the past decade, several researchers have been extensively applied machine learning (ML) methods to predict soil liquefaction. This paper presents the prediction of soil liquefaction from the SPT dataset by using relatively new and robust tree-based ensemble algorithms, namely Adaptive Boosting, Gradient Boosting Machine, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). The innovation points introduced in this paper are presented briefly as follows. Firstly, Stratified Random Sampling was utilized to ensure equalized sampling between each class selection. Secondly, feature selection methods such as Recursive Feature Elimination, Boruta, and Stepwise Regression were applied to develop models with a high degree of accuracy and minimal complexity by selecting the variables with significant predictive features. Thirdly, the performance of ML algorithms with feature selection methods was compared in terms of four performance metrics, Overall Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F-measure to select the best model. Lastly, the best predictive model was determined using a statistical significance test called Wilcoxon's sign rank test. Furthermore, computational cost analyses of the tree-based ensemble algorithms were performed based on parallel and non-parallel processing. The results of the study suggest that all developed tree-based ensemble models could reliably estimate soil liquefaction. In conclusion, according to both validation and statistical results, the XGBoost with the Boruta model achieved the most stable and better prediction performance than the other models in all considered cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]