Efficient prediction uncertainty quantification in dam behavior monitoring with attention-based sequence-to-sequence learning

Abstract

Displacement is an intuitive monitoring indicator of dam structural behavior. Conventional deterministic modeling methods frequently disregard the inherent uncertainty associated with monitoring data. This study aims to quantify such uncertainties within dam displacement predictions by augmenting a sequence-to-sequence structure with the novel recurrent unit, termed as tiny gated unit (TGU), attention mechanism, as well as quantile regression, resulting in the Att-S2STQ model. Specifically, TGU adopts only one gate to identify nonlinearity in data sequences, while Bahdanau attention mechanism dynamically assigns weights to different parts of the input sequence. The inclusion of quantile regression allows Att-S2STQ to produce prediction intervals (PIs), from which the probability density functions (PDFs) and cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) are further derived via kernel density estimation. PIs, PDFs, and CDFs jointly serve to reveal the prediction uncertainty. The effectiveness of the model is illustrated through comparative experiments using real-world dam monitoring datasets. Results indicate that the proposed model outperforms traditional methods in point, interval, and probability predictions, while also having a simpler structure and faster training. The superiority of both accuracy and efficiency makes it a valuable tool for dam management, aiding in data-driven decision-making and enhancing operational safety.