Hybrid metamodel of radial basis function and polynomial chaos expansions with orthogonal constraints for global sensitivity analysis

In this study, a hybrid metamodel using the orthogonal constraints of radial basis function and sparse polynomial chaos expansions is proposed for the global sensitivity analysis of time-consuming models. Firstly, the orthogonal conditions of radial basis functions (RBF) and polynomial chaos expansions (PCE) were derived to construct the hybrid metamodel. Then, the variance of the metamodel was decoupled into the variances of the RBF and PCE independently by using the orthogonal condition. Furthermore, the analytical formulations of Sobol indices for the hybrid metamodel were derived according to the orthogonal decomposition. Thus, the interaction items of radial basis function and polynomial chaos expansions were eliminated, which significantly simplifies the Sobol indices. Two analytical cases were employed to investigate the influence of the number of the polynomial chaos expansions items, and several analytical and engineering cases were tested to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. In the engineering cases, the proposed method yielded significant improvements in terms of both accuracy and efficiency comparing with the existing global sensitivity analysis approaches, which indicates that the proposed method is more appropriate to the global sensitivity analysis of time-consuming engineering problems.