Development of targeted safety hazard management plans utilizing multidimensional association rule mining

Investigating hidden hazards and implementing closed-loop management are essential strategies for accident prevention in the mining industry. This study tackles a key challenge in applying association rule mining to the development of hazard management plans for underground mines. The current approach mainly focuses on hazard description data, often underutilizing critical information such as hazard time and location. To address this, we integrate topic mining with association rule mining to uncover intrinsic association patterns among various attributes of mine safety hazards. Through a systematic analysis of standardized mining hazard attributes, five key analytical dimensions were identified: Hazard Type, Level, Time, Location, and Responsible Units. A topic mining model, utilizing the Biterm Topic Model, was constructed to reduce dimensionality and aggregate hazard description data. Evaluation indicators such as Standard Lift and Difference Degree were proposed, resulting in a multidimensional association rule mining model for mining safety hazards. In this research, 1387 valid rules were extracted based on hazard inspection data from an underground gold mine in China. The analysis revealed relatively strong associations between hazard location and hazard type, responsible unit, as well as hazard level, with association degrees of 1.934, 1.412, and 1.240, respectively. Additionally, 15 rules with a high degree of differentiation were identified to explore interesting correlations among different attributes. Based on this, corresponding control measures and improvement plans were developed for 19 locations. The results demonstrate that a multidimensional partition-based association rule mining approach for mining safety hazards can significantly enhance the specificity of safety training and improve the efficiency of safety hazard investigation.