Evaluation of the earthquake induced uplift displacement of tunnels using multivariate adaptive regression splines

Underground structures located in areas with saturated soil are vulnerable to floating behaviour during earthquakes. This article aims to develop a simple approach for estimating the uplift displacement of underground structures. A large number of artificial data are generated using the finite difference method. These data, consisting of various features of structures, soils, and earthquakes, provide the basis for the development of a multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS) model. The relative importance is used to quantitatively investigate the influence of each parameter and coupled interaction on the results. The developed method is validated through centrifuge tests.