Variance-based reliability sensitivity with dependent inputs using failure samples

Reliability sensitivity analysis is concerned with measuring the influence of a system’s uncertain input parameters on its probability of failure. Statistically dependent inputs present a challenge in both computing and interpreting these sensitivity indices; such dependencies require discerning between variable interactions produced by the probabilistic model describing the system inputs and the computational model describing the system itself. To accomplish such a separation of effects in the context of reliability sensitivity analysis we extend on an idea originally proposed by Mara and Tarantola (2012) for model outputs unrelated to rare events. We compute the independent (influence via computational model) and full (influence via both computational and probabilistic model) contributions of all inputs to the variance of the indicator function of the rare event. We compute this full set of variance-based sensitivity indices of the rare event indicator using a single set of failure samples. This is possible by considering $d$ different hierarchically structured isoprobabilistic transformations of this set of failure samples from the original $d$-dimensional space of dependent inputs to standard-normal space. The approach facilitates computing the full set of variance-based reliability sensitivity indices with a single set of failure samples obtained as the byproduct of a single run of a sample-based rare event estimation method. That is, no additional evaluations of the computational model are required. We demonstrate the approach on a test function and two engineering problems.