Fast unsupervised learning methods for structural health monitoring with large vibration data from dense sensor networks

Data-driven damage localization is an important step of vibration-based structural health monitoring. Statistical pattern recognition based on the prominent steps of feature extraction and statistical decision-making provides an effective and efficient framework for structural health monitoring. However, these steps may become time-consuming or complex when there are large volumes of vibration measurements acquired by dense sensor networks. To deal with this issue, this study proposes fast unsupervised learning methods for feature extraction through autoregressive modeling and damage localization through a new distance measure called Kullback–Leibler divergence with empirical probability measure. The feature extraction approach consists of an iterative algorithm for order selection and parameter estimation aiming to extract residuals in the training phase and another iterative process aiming to extract residuals only in the monitoring phase. The key feature of the proposed approach is the use of correlated residual samples of the autoregressive model as a new time series at each iteration, rather than handling the measured vibration response of the structure. This is shown to highly reduce the computational burden of order selection and feature extraction; moreover, it effectively provides low-order autoregressive models with uncorrelated residuals. The Kullback–Leibler divergence with empirical probability measure method exploits a segmentation technique to subdivide random data into independent sets and provides a distance metric based on the theory of empirical probability measure with no need to explicitly compute the actual probability distributions at the training and monitoring stages. Numerical and experimental benchmarks are then used to assess accuracy and performance of the proposed methods and compare them with some state-of-the-art approaches. Results show that the proposed approaches are successful in feature extraction and damage localization, with a reduced computational burden.