Active transfer learning for structural health monitoring

Data for training structural health monitoring (SHM) systems are often expensive and/or impractical to obtain, particularly for labelled data. Population-based SHM (PBSHM) aims to address this limitation by leveraging data from multiple structures. However, data from different structures will follow distinct distributions, potentially leading to large generalisation errors for models learnt via conventional machine learning methods. To address this issue, transfer learning – in the form of domain adaptation (DA) – can be used to align the data distributions. Most previous approaches have only considered unsupervised DA, where no labelled target data are available; they do not consider how to incorporate these technologies in an online framework – updating as labels are obtained throughout the monitoring campaign. This paper proposes a Bayesian framework for DA in PBSHM, that can improve unsupervised DA mappings using a limited quantity of labelled target data. In addition, this model is integrated into an active sampling strategy to guide inspections to select the most informative observations to label – leading to further reductions in the required labelled data to learn a target classifier. The effectiveness of this methodology is evaluated on a population of experimental bridges. Specifically, this population includes data corresponding to several damage states, as well as, a comprehensive set of environmental conditions. It is found that combining transfer learning and active learning can improve data efficiency when learning classification models in label-scarce scenarios. This result has implications for data-informed operation and maintenance of structures, suggesting a reduction in inspections over the operational lifetime of a structure – and therefore a reduction in operational costs – can be achieved.