Abstract
Most construction works on the soft ground adopt instrumentation to manage settlement and stability of the embankment. The rapid progress of the information technologies and the digital data acquisition on the soft ground instrumentation has led to the fast-growing amount of data. Although valuable information about the behaviour of the soft ground may be hiding behind the data, most of the data are used restrictedly only for the management of settlement and stability. One of the critical issues on soft ground instrumentation is the long-term settlement prediction. Some observational settlement analysis methods are used for this purpose. But the reliability of the analysis results is remained in vague. The knowledge could be discovered from a large volume of experiences on the observational settlement analysis. In this article, we present a database to store settlement records and data mining procedure. A large volume of knowledge about observational settlement prediction were collected from the database by applying the filtering algorithm and knowledge discovery algorithm. Statistical analysis revealed that the reliability of observational settlement analysis depends on stay duration and estimated degree of consolidation.