42 International Journal of Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering, 3(2), 42-59, July-December 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Keywords: Failure, Geotechnical Engineering, Liquefaction, Liquefable Soils, Pile Foundation, Support Vector Machine INTRODUCTION Collapse and/or severe damage of piled founda- tions in liquefiable soils are still observed after most major earthquakes, see for example 1995 Kobe or 2001 Bhuj earthquake. Figure 1 shows the severe tilting of the Kandla Tower building, supported on piled foundations, following the 2001 Bhuj earthquake rendering it useless or very expensive to rehabilitate. Following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, an investigation was carried out to find the failure patterns for such Support Vector Classifers for Prediction of Pile Foundation Performance in Liquefed Ground During Earthquakes Pijush Samui, VIT University, India Subhamoy Bhattacharya, University of Bristol, UK T. G. Sitharam, Indian Institute of Science - Bangalore, India ABSTRACT Collapse of pile-supported structures is still observed in liquefable soils after most major earthquakes and remains a continuing concern to the geotechnical engineering community. Current methods for pile design in liquefable soils concentrate on a bending mechanism arising from lateral loads due to inertia and/or soil movement (kinematic loads). Recent investigations demonstrated that a pile or pile group can become laterally unstable (buckling instability/ bifurcation) under the axial load (due to the dead load) alone if the soil surrounding the pile liquefes in an earthquake. This is due to the liquefaction-induced elimination of the soil bracings and the governing mechanism is similar to Euler’s buckling of unsupported struts. Analysed are 26 cases of pile foundation performance in liquefable soils giving emphasis to the buckling instability using Support Vector Machine (SVM) method. SVM has recently emerged as an elegant pattern recognition tool. This tool has been used to classify pile performance against buckling failure. Each of the case studies reported is represented by four parameters: Effective buckling length of pile (L eff ), the allowable load on the pile (P), Euler’s elastic critical load of the pile (P cr ) and minimum radius of gyration of the pile (r min ). The performance of the developed SVM is 100%. DOI: 10.4018/jgee.2012070104