Back analysis of rock mass parameters in tunnel engineering using machine learning techniques

Efficient determination of the rock mass properties is vitally important for calculating and evaluating tunnel stability in tunnel engineering. The back analysis method has been widely used as an indirect method for determining rock mass parameters based on field measurements. However, most back analysis methods are generally time-consuming for numerical simulation and are merely based on the measured displacement, which leads to the identification of rock mass parameters that cannot fully reflect the characteristics of the surrounding rock. To improve the accuracy of the estimation of rock mass parameters, this paper presents a back analysis method based on multi-output support vector regression (MSVR) and differential evolution (DE) algorithms. Firstly, the global sensitivity analysis of rock mass parameters is analyzed using the elementary effects method. Numerical simulation is then carried out to prepare training samples. DE algorithm is used to determine the optimum hyperparameters of MSVR. Based on the monitoring data, the rock mass properties of the selected sensitive parameters are estimated by the constructed MSVR model. A high-speed railway tunnel is utilized to demonstrate the effectiveness of the MSVR with the DE algorithm (DE-MSVR). The results show that the DE-MSVR with mixed monitoring data of vault settlement, convergence, and rock mass stress has higher forecasting performance than these models with a single type of monitoring data. It is feasible to use the monitoring data at the early stages combined with the numerical simulation for parameter back analysis. Moreover, the comparison results show that the presented method exhibits higher prediction accuracy than the existing back analysis models.