A novel method for identifying geomechanical parameters of rock masses based on a PSO and improved GPR hybrid algorithm

In view of the shortcomings of existing artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector regression (SVR) in the application of three-dimensional displacement back analysis, Gaussian process regression (GPR) algorithm is introduced to make up for the shortcomings of existing intelligent inversion methods. In order to improve the generality of the standard GPR algorithm with single kernel function, an improved Gaussian process regression (IGPR) algorithm with combined kernel function is proposed by adding two single kernel functions. In addition, in the training process of IGPR model, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is combined with the IGPR model (PSO-IGPR) to optimize the parameters of the IGPR model. After the IGPR model can accurately map the relationship between geomechanical parameters and rock mass deformation, the PSO algorithm is directly used to search the best geomechanical parameters to match the deformation calculated by igpr model with the measured deformation of rock mass. The application case of Beikou tunnel shows that the combined kernel function GPR has higher identification accuracy than the single kernel function GPR and SVR model, the IGPR model with automatic correlation determination (ARD) kernel function can obtain higher identification accuracy than the IGPR model with isotropic (ISO) kernel function, and the PSO-IGPR hybrid model based on ARD kernel function has the highest identification accuracy. Therefore, this paper proposes a displacement back analysis method of the PSO-IGPR hybrid algorithm based on ARD kernel function, which can be used to identify the geomechanical parameters of rock mass and solve other engineering problems.