Advancing post-earthquake structural evaluations via sequential regression-based predictive mean matching for enhanced forecasting in the context of missing data

After an earthquake, every damaged building needs to be properly evaluated in order to determine its capacity to withstand aftershocks as well as to assess safety for occupants to return. These evaluations are time-sensitive as the quicker they are completed, the less costly the disaster will be in terms of lives and dollars lost. In this direction, there is often not sufficient time or resources to acquire all information regarding the structure to do a high-level structural analysis. The post-earthquake damage survey data may be incomplete and contain missing values, which delays the analytical procedure or even makes structural evaluation impossible. This paper proposes a novel multiple imputation (MI) approach to address the missing data problem by filling in each missing value with multiple realistic, valid candidates, accounting for the uncertainty of missing data. The proposed method, called sequential regression-based predictive mean matching (SRB-PMM), utilizes Bayesian parameter estimation to consecutively infer the model parameters for variables with missing values, conditional based on the fully observed and imputed variables. Given the model parameters, a hybrid approach integrating PMM with a cross-validation algorithm is developed to obtain the most plausible imputed data set. Two examples are carried out to validate the usefulness of the SRB-PMM approach based on a database including 262 reinforced concrete (RC) column specimens subjected to earthquake loads. The results from both examples suggest that the proposed SRB-PMM approach is an effective means to handle missing data problems prominent in post-earthquake structural evaluations.