This study presents a machine learning-based approach for sensitivity analysis to examine how parameters affect a given structural response while accounting for uncertainty. Reliability-based sensitivity analysis involves repeated evaluations of the performance function incorporating uncertainties to estimate the influence of a model parameter, which can lead to prohibitive computational costs. This challenge is exacerbated for large-scale engineering problems which often carry a large quantity of uncertain parameters. The proposed approach is based on feature selection algorithms that rank feature importance and remove redundant predictors during model development which improve model generality and training performance by focusing only on the significant features. The approach allows performing sensitivity analysis of structural systems by providing feature rankings with reduced computational effort. The proposed approach is demonstrated with two designs of a two-bay, two-story planar steel frame with different failure modes: inelastic instability of a single member and progressive yielding. The feature variables in the data are uncertainties including material yield strength, Young’s modulus, frame sway imperfection, and residual stress. The Monte Carlo sampling method is utilized to generate random realizations of the frames from published distributions of the feature parameters, and the response variable is the frame ultimate strength obtained from finite element analyses. Decision trees are trained to identify important features. Feature rankings are derived by four feature selection techniques including impurity-based, permutation, SHAP, and Spearman's correlation. Predictive performance of the model including the important features are discussed using the evaluation metric for imbalanced datasets, Matthews correlation coefficient. Finally, the results are compared with those from reliability-based sensitivity analysis on the same example frames to show the validity of the feature selection approach. As the proposed machine learning-based approach produces the same results as the reliability-based sensitivity analysis with improved computational efficiency and accuracy, it could be extended to other structural systems.
Machine learning-based feature importance approach for sensitivity analysis of steel frames