TY - JOUR A1 - Kühn, Nico M. A1 - Scherbaum, Frank T1 - Ground-motion prediction model building: a multilevel approach JF - Bulletin of earthquake engineering : official publication of the European Association for Earthquake Engineering N2 - A Bayesian ground-motion model is presented that directly estimates the coefficients of the model and the correlation between different ground-motion parameters of interest. The model is developed as a multi-level model with levels for earthquake, station and record terms. This separation allows to estimate residuals for each level and thus the estimation of the associated aleatory variability. In particular, the usually estimated within-event variability is split into a between-station and between-record variability. In addition, the covariance structure between different ground-motion parameters of interest is estimated for each level, i.e. directly the between-event, between-station and between-record correlation coefficients are available. All parameters of the model are estimated via Bayesian inference, which allows to assess their epistemic uncertainty in a principled way. The model is developed using a recently compiled European strong-motion database. The target variables are peak ground velocity, peak ground acceleration and spectral acceleration at eight oscillator periods. The model performs well with respect to its residuals, and is similar to other ground-motion models using the same underlying database. The correlation coefficients are similar to those estimated for other parts of the world, with nearby periods having a high correlation. The between-station, between-event and between-record correlations follow generally a similar trend. KW - Ground-motion prediction equation KW - Probabilistic seismic hazard analysis and Bayesian inference KW - Multilevel model KW - Correlation KW - Single-station sigma Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10518-015-9732-3 SN - 1570-761X SN - 1573-1456 VL - 13 IS - 9 SP - 2481 EP - 2491 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht ER -