Applying Sensitivity Analysis in Structure Damage Identification

Structure health monitoring aims to detect the nature of structure damage by using a network of sensors, whose sensor signals are highly correlated and mixed with noise, it is difficult to identify direct relationship between sensors and abnormal structure characteristics. In this study, we apply sensor sensitivity analysis on a structure damage identifier, which integrates independent component analysis (ICA) and support vector machine (SVM) together. The approach is evaluated on a benchmark data from University of British Columbia. Experimental results show sensitivity analysis not only helps domain experts understand the mapping from different location and type of sensors to a damage class, but also significantly reduce noise and improve the accuracy of different level damages identification.