A domain adaptation approach to damage classification with an application to bridge monitoring.

Data-driven machine-learning algorithms generally suffer from a lack of labelled health-state data, mainly those referring to damage conditions. To address such an issue, population-based structural health monitoring seeks to enrich the original dataset by transferring knowledge from a population of monitored structures. Within this context, this paper presents a transfer learning approach, based on domain adaptation, to leverage information from completely-labelled bridge structure data to accurately predict new instances of an unknown target domain. Since intrinsic structural differences may cause distribution shifts, domain adaptation attempts to minimise the distance between the domains and to learn a mapping within a shared feature space. Specifically, the methodology involves the long-term acquisition of natural frequencies from several structural scenarios. Such damage-sensitive features are then aligned via domain adaptation so that a machine-learning algorithm can effectively utilise the labelled source domain data and generalise well to the unlabelled target-domain data. The described procedure is applied to two case studies, including the Z24 and the S101 benchmark bridges and their finite element models, respectively. The results demonstrate the successful exchange of health-state labels to identify the damage class within a population of bridges equipped with SHM systems, showing potential to reduce computational efforts and to deal with scarce or poor data sets in application to bridge network monitoring. • A data-based domain adaptation framework is applied to bridge monitoring. • Domain Adaptation aligns and transform damage-sensitive features into a shared feature space. • Joint Domain Adaptation and Normal Condition Alignment are compared and discussed. • The KNN algorithm uses the transformed features to perform damage detection and classification. • The method is applied to transfer health-state labels across real bridges and finite element models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]