Abstract

Anomaly detection for the penetration rate of tunnel boring machines (TBMs) is crucial for effective risk management in TBM tunnel projects. However, previous machine learning models for predicting the penetration rate have struggled with imbalanced data between normal and abnormal penetration rates. This study aims to enhance the performance of machine learning-based anomaly detection for the penet- ration rate by utilizing a data augmentation technique to address this data imbalance. Initially, six input features were selected through correlation analysis. The lowest and highest 10% of the penetration rates were designated as abnormal classes, while the remaining penetration rates were categorized as a normal class. Two prediction models were developed, each trained on an original training set and an oversampled training set constructed using SMOTE (synthetic minority oversampling technique): an XGB (extreme gradient boosting) model and an XGB-SMOTE model. The predic- tion results showed that the XGB model performed poorly for the abnormal classes, despite performing well for the normal class. In contrast, the XGB-SMOTE model consistently exhibited superior performance across all classes. These findings can be attributed to the data augmentation for the abnormal penetration rates using SMOTE, which enhances the model’s ability to learn patterns between geological and operational factors that contribute to abnormal penetration rates. Consequently, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of employing data augmentation to manage imbalanced data in anomaly detection for TBM penetration rates.