A novel data-driven method for structural health monitoring under ambient vibration and high-dimensional features by robust multidimensional scaling

Dealing with the problem of large volumes of high-dimensional features and detecting damage under ambient vibration are critical to structural health monitoring. To address these challenges, this article proposes a novel data-driven method for early damage detection of civil engineering structures by robust multidimensional scaling. The proposed method consists of some simple but effective computational parts including a segmentation process, a pairwise distance calculation, an iterative algorithm regarding robust multidimensional scaling, a matrix vectorization procedure, and a Euclidean norm computation. AutoRegressive Moving Average models are fitted to vibration time-domain responses caused by ambient excitations to extract the model residuals as high-dimensional features. In order to increase the reliability of damage detection and avoid any false alarm, the extreme value theory is considered to determine a reliable threshold limit. However, the selection of an appropriate extreme value distribution is crucial and troublesome. To cope with this limitation, this article introduces the generalized extreme value distribution and its shape parameter for choosing the best extreme value model among Gumbel, Fréchet, and Weibull distributions. The main contributions of this article include developing a novel data-driven strategy for early damage detection and addressing the limitation of using high-dimensional features. Experimental data sets of two well-known civil structures are utilized to validate the proposed method along with some comparative studies. Results demonstrate that the proposed data-driven method in conjunction with the extreme value theory is highly able to detect damage under ambient vibration and high-dimensional features.