Application of advanced statistical methods for extracting long-term trends in static monitoring data from an arch dam

The objective of this article is to develop methods for extracting trends from long-term structural health monitoring data and try to set an early warning threshold level based on the results of analyses. The long-term monitoring data in this study is the continuous monitoring of the dam static deformation. Two different approaches were applied to extract features of the long-term structural health monitoring data of the static deformation of the Fei-Tsui Arch Dam (Taiwan). The methods include the singular spectrum analysis with auto regressive model (SSA-AR) and the nonlinear principal component analysis (NPCA) using auto-associative neural network method (AANN). The singular spectrum analysis is a novel nonparametric technique based on principles of multi-variance statistics. An AR model is optimized for each of the principal components obtained from SSA, and the multi step predicted values are recombined to make the time series. Different from SSA method the NPCA-AANN method is also used to extract the underlying features of static deformation of the dam. By using these two different methods, the residual deformation between the estimated and the recorded data was generated, through statistical analysis, the threshold level of the dam static deformation can be determined. Discussion on the two proposed methods to the static deformation monitoring data of Fei-Tsui Arch Dam (Taiwan) is discussed.