Analysis about factors affecting the degree of damage of buildings in earthquake

Earthquakes have been affecting human's safety through human's history. Previous studies on earthquake, mostly, focused on the performance of buildings or evaluating damages. This paper, however, compares different factors that have influence on the damage of buildings with a case study in Wenchuan earthquake, using multiple linear regression methodology, so as to identify to what extend this factors influence the buildings' damages, then give the rank of importance of these factors. In this process, authors take the type of structure as a dummy variable to compare the degree of damages caused by different types of structure, which were barely studied before. Besides, Factor Analysis Methodology(FA) will be adapted to classify factors, the results of which will simplify later study. The outcome of this study would make a big difference in optimizing the seismic design and improving residential seismic quality.