Urban Quarry Ground Vibration Forecasting: A Matrix Factorization Approach

Blasting is routinely carried out in urban quarry sites. Residents or houses around quarry sites are affected by the ground vibrations induced by blasting. Peak Particle Velocity (PPV) is used as a metric to measure ground vibration intensity. Therefore, many prediction models of PPV using experimental methods, statistical methods, and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been proposed to mitigate this effect. However, prediction models using experimental and statistical methods have a tendency of poor prediction accuracy. In addition, while prediction models using ANNs can produce a highly accurate prediction results, a large amount of measured data is necessarily collected. In an urban quarry site where the number of blastings is limited, it is difficult to collect a lot of measured data. In this study, a new PPV prediction method using Weighted Non-negative Matrix Factorization (WNMF) is proposed. WNMF is a method that approximates a non-negative matrix (including missing data) to the product of two low-dimensional matrices and predicts the missing data. In addition, WNMF is one of the unsupervised learning methods, so it can predict PPV regardless of the amount of data. In this study, PPV was predicted using measured data from 100 sites at the Mikurahana quarry site in Japan. As a result, the proposed method showed higher accuracy when using measured data at 60 sites rather than 100 sites, and the root mean square error for PPV prediction decreased from 0.1759 (100 points) to 0.1378 (60 points).