Machine Learning-Based Classification of Rock Bursts in an Active Coal Mine Dominated by Non-Destructive Tremors

Rock bursts are dynamic phenomena in underground openings, causing damage to support and infrastructure, and are one of the main natural hazards in underground coal mines. The prediction of rock bursts is important for improving safety in mine openings. The hazard of rock bursts is correlated with seismic activity, but rock bursts are rare compared to non-destructive tremors. The five machine learning classifiers (multilayer perceptron, adaptive boosting, gradient boosting, K-nearest neighbors, and Gaussian naïve Bayes), along with an ensemble hard-voting classifier composed of these classifiers, were used to recognize rock bursts among the dominant non-destructive tremors. Machine learning models were trained and tested on ten sets of randomly selected data obtained from one of the active hard coal mines in the Upper Silesian Coal Basin, Poland. For each of the 627 cases in the database, 15 features representing geological, geomechanical, mining, and technical conditions in the opening as well as tremor energy and correlated peak particle velocity were determined. Geological and geomechanical parameters of the coal seams and surrounding rocks were aggregated into a single GEO index. The share of rock bursts in the database was only about 8.5%; therefore, the ADASYN balancing method, which addresses imbalanced datasets, was used. The ensemble hard-voting classifier most effectively classified rock bursts, with an average recall of 0.74.