Evaluation of the exact conditional spectrum and generalized conditional intensity measure methods for ground motion selection

Summary Two existing, contemporary ground motion selection and modification procedures – (i) exact conditional spectrum (CS‐exact) and (ii) generalized conditional intensity measure (GCIM) – are evaluated in their ability to accurately estimate seismic demand hazard curves (SDHCs) of a given structure at a specified site. The amount of effort involved in implementing these procedures to compute a single SDHC is studied, and a case study is chosen where rigorous benchmark SDHCs can be determined for evaluation purposes. By comparing estimates from ground motion selection and modification procedures with the benchmark, we conclude that estimates from CS‐exact are unbiased in many of the cases considered. The estimates from GCIM are even more accurate, as they are unbiased for most – but not all – of the cases where estimates from CS‐exact are biased. We find that it is possible to obtain biased SDHCs from GCIM, even after employing a very diverse collection of intensity measures to select ground motions and implementing its bias‐checking feature, because it is usually difficult to identify intensity measures that are truly ‘sufficient’ for the response of a complex, multi‐degree‐of‐freedom system. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.