Efficient sampling of the irregular probability distributions of geotechnical parameters for reliability analysis

•An efficient sampling method that is based on a mixture of uniform distributions is proposed.•Irregular probability distributions can be efficiently sampled using the proposed method.•The proposed method is also effective in sampling of the joint probability distribution and posterior distribution.•Four examples have been investigated to rigorously validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.•The proposed method can conveniently facilitate the geotechnical reliability analysis with limited data.