A New Performance Metric for 2D/3D Data-Driven Site Characterization Methods

This paper proposes to use a shape distribution to compare the soil layer identification ability in data-driven site characterization (DDSC). The proposed approach can represent the shape signature for a 2D/3D distribution of a soil layer as a probability distribution sampled from a shape function measuring geometric properties of the 3D model, and the probability distribution is called shape distribution. There are some options of shape functions, and this study uses D2 shape function (measures the distance between two random points on the surface) because it is easy to compute and robust. The applicability of the shape distribution as a performance metric in DDSC was demonstrated through a 2D simple example. Unlike existing accuracy measures for soil layer identification, a shape distribution can consider the 2D/3D shapes of a soil layer more precisely and can be a useful measure to compare the performance of DDSC methods.