A Deep Learning Approach Replacing the Finite Difference Method for In Situ Stress Prediction

In the domain of geotechnical engineering analysis, fast Lagrangian analysis based on the finite difference method is the most commonly used numerical analysis method. It is a classical numerical algorithm applied to calculate the in situ stress. In this paper, we propose a deep learning (DL) architecture called the enhance-and-split feature capsule network embedded in fully convolutional neural networks (ES-Caps-FCN) to predict the in situ stress for a strain-softening model when using the finite difference method for the numerical computation. Experiments indicate that this novel approach is stable and convergent. Compared with some classical prediction methods including linear regression analysis and a deep neural network, the mean squared error of our proposed algorithm is as low as 0.059866%, which is lower than the 0.616676% of the deep neural network prediction algorithm and the 0.978495% of the conventional machine learning algorithm. Additionally, the calculation efficiency of fully trained deep learning models is superior to that of the conventional finite difference method. Therefore, DL is a feasible and promising fast and accurate surrogate for the finite difference method for solving the in situ stress.