Currently in increasing number of urban tunnels with small overburden are excavated according to the principle of the New Austrian Tunneling Method (NATM). Successful design, construction and maintenance of NATM tunnel in urban area demands prediction, control and monitoring of surface settlement, gradient and ground displacement with high accuracy. Use of measured displacement for parameter determination has been researched over the years, and one geotechnical engineering principle has been formed as back analysis. In this paper, back analysis of a ground deformational behavior involving nonlinear behavior is discussed. It is of primary importance to make reliable prediction of deformational behavior for shallow tunnels in soft ground. However, predictions made often prove to be incorrect due to complexity of constitutive law and other relevant factors. Back analysis therefore becomes more important, for it may be used to interpret measured displacement to derive nonlinear material characteristics. The paper shows some example in which a deformational mechanism is studied in the light of inhomogeneous distrubution of Young``s module, from which a logic is derived to identify two different types of nonlinear constitutive relationships.