Vibration-based damage detection in civil structures using data-driven methods requires sufficient vibration responses acquired with a sensor network. Due to technical and economic reasons, it is not always possible to deploy a large number of sensors. This limitation may lead to partial information being handled for damage detection purposes, under environmental variability. To address this challenge, this article proposes an innovative multi-level machine learning method by employing the autoregressive spectrum as the main damage-sensitive feature. The proposed method consists of three levels: (i) distance calculation by the log-spectral distance, to increase damage detectability and generate distance-based training and test samples; (ii) feature normalization by an improved factor analysis, to remove environmental variations; and (iii) decision-making for damage localization by means of the Jensen–Shannon divergence. The major contributions of this research are represented by the development of the aforementioned multi-level machine learning method, and by the proposal of the new factor analysis for feature normalization. Limited vibration datasets relevant to a truss structure and consisting of acceleration time histories induced by shaker excitation in a passive system, have been used to validate the proposed method and to compare it with alternate, state-of-the-art strategies

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