Relevance vector machine applied to settlement of shallow foundation on cohesionless soils

The settlement of shallow foundation on cohesionless soil is a key parameter in the design of shallow foundation. The recently introduced relevance vector machine (RVM) technique is applied to predict the settlement of shallow foundation on cohesionless soils. RVM allows computation of the prediction intervals, taking into account the uncertainties of both the parameters and the data. It provides much sparser regressors without compromising performance, and kernel bases give a small but worthwhile improvement in performance. It also estimates the prediction variance. This study shows that compared to the available methods, RVM is better at determining the settlement of shallow foundation on cohesionless soil.