An explainable artificial-intelligence-aided safety factor prediction of road embankments.

Despite the widespread application of data-centric techniques in Geotechnical Engineering, there is a rising need for building trust in the artificial intelligence (AI)-driven safety assessment of road embankments due to its so-called "black-box" nature. In addition, from the lens of limit equilibrium approaches, e.g., Bishop, Fellenius, Janbu and Morgenstern–Price, and finite element method, it is essential to carefully examine the interplay of both topological and physical/mechanical properties during the safety factor (FoS) predictions. First, aside from having conventional geotechnical inputs for soil in core and foundation and the height of embankments, this paper codifies geometric features innovatively. The number of slope types with different ratios including 1:1, 1.5:1 and 2:1 as well as the number of berms is introduced. Second, a pool of 19 machine learning (ML) techniques is effortlessly trained on the dataset using an automated ML (AutoML) pipeline to identify the most optimized ML algorithm. Finally, to achieve post-hoc interpretability for the internal mechanism of the input–output relationship unbiasedly, a game-theory-based explainable AI (XAI) method called Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) values is applied. SHAP-aided importance analysis provides human-interpretable insights and indicates height, California bearing ratio, slope type 2:1 and cohesion as the most influential parameters. Exclusively, analyzing hazardous embankments by classifying main and joint contributors exhibits a complex and highly variable influence on the FoS. This paper harnesses the power of XAI tools to enhance reliability and transparency for the rapid FoS prediction of slopes. It targets geotechnical researchers, practitioners, decision-makers, and the general public for the first time. • Shedding light on the AI-aided slope stability analysis with SHAP values. • Coupling AutoML and XAI for reliable and easy-to-use FoS prediction of embankments. • Defining novel geometric parameters to capture their impact on geotechnical ones. • Categorizing unstable embankments from the global and local XAI perspectives. • Analyzing hazardous embankments by classifying main and joint contributors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]