Search

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly being leveraged by the mining industry to understand how rock properties vary at a mine site. In previously published work, the rock type, granodiorite, was predicted with high accuracy by the random forest (RF) ML method at the Erdenet copper mine in Mongolia. As a result of the optimistic results (86% overall success rate), this paper extended the research to determine if ML would be successful in modeling rock domains. Rock domains are groups of rocks that occur together. There were two additional goals. One was to determine if the variograms could predict or help understand how ML methods would perform on the data. The second was to determine if 2D modeling would perform well given the disseminated nature of the deposit. ML methods, multilayer perceptron (MLP), k-nearest neighborhood (KNN) and RF, were applied to model six rock domains, D0–D5, in 2D and 3D. Modeling performance was poor in 2D. Prediction performance accuracy was high in 3D for the domains D1 (92–94%), D2 (94–96%) and D4 (85–98%). Note that the domains D1 and D2 together constituted about 80% of the samples. Conclusions drawn in this paper are based on the results of 3D modeling since 2D modeling performance was poor. Prediction performance appeared to depend on two factors. It was better for a domain when the domain was not a minuscule proportion of the sample. It was also better for domains whose indicator semi-variogram (ISV) range was high. For example, though D4 only contributed 15% of the samples, the range was high. MLP did not perform as well as KNN and RF, with RF performing the best. The hyperparameters of KNN and RF suggested that performance was best when only a small number of samples were used to make a prediction. One overall summary conclusion is that the two most important domains, D1 and D2, could be predicted with high accuracy using ML. The second summary conclusion is that semi-variograms can provide insight into ML performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper probed into the whole height bench cast blasting process and described the influence factors from 3 major perspectives; natural geological, blasting scheming and factitious ones, and selected the throwing rate which was generally accepted in the cast blasting field to assess the blasting performance. Then a novel GA-SVM model was constructed to analyze the real collected explosion data from open pit mining, and verified in a certain open-pit. Also the MIV method was employed to analyze the influence factor at each input factor. The study indicate that; (T) the presented GA-SVM model performs more robust and accurate than other artificial intelligence models such as BP, RBF, GRNN and GA-BP, which has a more stable prediction accuracy of 83.75%. Moreover, due to the ubiquitous paradigm of the presented approach, it provides a single, unified approach to evaluating other blasting performance factors such as the longest thrown distance and loose coefficient etc; (2) for this certain open pit which maintains a steady lithological character and design parameters, the bench height, explosive specific charge possess a positive correlation coefficient with the throwing rate, while line of least resistance, the slope angle and the profile width perform the opposite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]