Prediction of Ground-Motion Parameters for the NGA-West2 Database Using Refined Second-Order Deep Neural Networks

ABSTRACT One of the key elements within seismic hazard analysis is the establishment of appropriate ground-motion models (GMMs), which are used to predict the levels of ground-motion intensities by considering various parameters (e.g., source, path, and site). Many empirical GMMs were derived on the basis of a predefined linear or nonlinear equation that is heavily dependent on the a priori knowledge of a functional form that varies between the modelers’ choices. To overcome this issue, this study develops a deep neural network (DNN) trained by the recordings from the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) Next Generation Attenuation-West2 Project (NGA-West2) database. To this end, we collected 20,900 ground motion recordings from the database and randomly split them into the training, validation, and testing datasets. The refined second-order neuron is proposed to solve the problem, and the Adam optimizer is used to optimize the performance of the model. The prediction errors are evaluated by three performance indicators (i.e., R2, root mean square error, mean absolute error), and the predictive results are compared with previous GMMs developed based on the PEER NGA-West2 database. The between-event and within-event standard deviations (SDs) as well as total SDs are calculated and compared. Based on the comparisons, our model maintains consistent performance (e.g., the dependence of predicted intensity measures on seismological and site-specific parameters) with the compared GMM. Its relatively small total SDs, especially for longer periods, confirm that the proposed model is associated with better predictive power.