A machine learning damage prediction model for the 2017 Puebla-Morelos, Mexico, earthquake

Abstract

© The Author(s) 2020. The 2017 Puebla, Mexico, earthquake event led to significant damage in many buildings in Mexico City. In the months following the earthquake, civil engineering students conducted detailed building assessments throughout the city. They collected building damage information and structural characteristics for 340 buildings in the Mexico City urban area, with an emphasis on the Roma and Condesa neighborhoods where they assessed 237 buildings. These neighborhoods are of particular interest due to the availability of seismic records captured by nearby recording stations, and preexisting information from when the neighborhoods were affected by the 1985 Michoacán earthquake. This article presents a case study on developing a damage prediction model using machine learning. It details a framework suitable for working with future post-earthquake observation data. Four algorithms able to perform classification tasks were trialed. Random forest, the best performing algorithm, achieves more than 65% prediction accuracy. The study of the feature importance for the random forest shows that the building location, seismic demand, and building height are the parameters that influence the model output the most.