Performance evaluation of hybrid GA–SVM and GWO–SVM models to predict earthquake-induced liquefaction potential of soil: a multi-dataset investigation

The prediction of the potential of soil liquefaction induced by the earthquake is a vital task in construction engineering and geotechnical engineering. To provide a possible solution to such problems, this paper proposes two support vector machine (SVM) models which are optimized by genetic algorithm (GA) and grey wolf optimizer (GWO) to predict the potential of soil liquefaction. Field observation data based on cone penetration test (CPT), standard penetration test (SPT) and shear wave velocity (V_S) test (SWVT) are employed to verify the reliability of the GA–SVM model and the GWO–SVM model, the numbers of input variables of these three field testing data sets are 6, 12 and 8, respectively, and the output result is the potential of soil liquefaction. To verify whether the two optimization algorithms GA and GWO have significantly improved the performance of SVM model, an unoptimized SVM model is served as a reference in this study. And five performance metrics, including classification accuracy rate (ACC), precision rate (PRE), recall rate (REC), F1 score (F1) and AUC are used to evaluate the classification performance of the three models. Results of the study confirm that when CPT-based, SPT-based and SWVT-based test sets are input into three classification models, the highest classification accuracy of 0.9825, 0.9032 and 0.9231, respectively, is achieved with GWO–SVM. And based on these three data sets, the values of AUC obtained by GWO–SVM are all higher than those obtained by GA–SVM. Further, by comparing the other metrics of the three classification models, it is found that the classification performance of the two hybrid models is very similar and significantly better than the SVM, which indicates that GWO–SVM, like GA–SVM, can also be used as a reliable model for predicting soil liquefaction potential.