Unsupervised structural damage identification based on covariance matrix and deep clustering

Structural damage identification is a major task in structural health monitoring. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms have been widely applied in the research of structural damage identification. Supervised algorithms require expert labeling, making it difficult to implement in engineering applications. Unsupervised structural damage identification algorithms are generally divided into two parts: damage‐sensitive factor extraction and damage determination. Existing algorithms all perform these two steps separately. This paper proposes a damage identification method combining covariance matrix and improved deep embedding clustering network (IDEC). IDEC can perform damage‐sensitive factor extraction and damage determination operations at the same time. The covariance matrix that introduces delay information contains rich damage features, and the combination of the two has been proven to effectively mine the damage‐sensitive feature space. After network hyperparameter optimization via Bayesian optimization, the proposed method is applied to the damage identification and quantification using real bridge acceleration response data under vehicle load. The results show that this method can identify structural damage with an accuracy of up to 97% with better performance than existing technologies, and it also has great performance in identifying small damages. The proposed method is expected to increase the damage identification accuracy if applied in engineering practice.