Efficient slope reliability analysis using adaptive classification-based sampling method

Slope reliability analysis can effectively account for uncertainties involved in a slope system. However, commonly used slope reliability analysis methods often require huge computational cost, especially in large-scale problems, which hinders its wide application to engineering practice. This paper proposes an efficient slope reliability analysis method based on the active learning support vector machine (SVM) and Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). The proposed method makes use of an active learning function and cross-validation techniques to select the most suitable training samples to update the SVM model. The selected training samples are associated with a small distance to the limit state surface of the slope stability model and a large local uncertainty, which are more informative to gradually tune the SVM model to approximate the actual slope performance function. As a result, the proposed method can estimate the slope reliability with a small number of evaluations of the slope performance function, thus improving the efficiency significantly. Four slope examples are employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The presented approach is also compared with some other commonly used surrogate models in slope reliability analysis. It is shown that the proposed method performs better in terms of computational efficiency to obtain similar estimation accuracy of the failure probability for the investigated examples.