Automatic microseismic signal classification for mining safety monitoring using the WaveNet classifier

Abstract

AbstractMicroseismic monitoring is a promising method for the safety monitoring of underground mines. However, it is crucial to isolate microseismic signals related to the collapse of a mine from others for successful monitoring because the monitoring system records various signals. Recently, deep learning‐based classification techniques have achieved high performance in such data classification problems. In this context, we develop an automatic signal classification technique using the modified WaveNet classifier. The main characteristic of the WaveNet structure is its ability to extract features at various frequencies from very long time‐series data, and such an advantage makes the WaveNet suitable for seismic data processing. The data imbalance problem coming from the safe condition of the monitoring target is solved by augmenting the training data with those acquired from another mine and employing class weighting. After training, an optimal classifier is chosen considering the loss function, accuracy and Fβ score. The optimal classifier shows very high accuracy and excellent performance for the test data prediction. Compared to the random forest model and another one‐dimensional convolutional neural network–based network, the suggested classifier has higher reliability in predicting microseismic signals. Even though the proposed WaveNet model has a much more complex structure than the random forest model, the actual application examples demonstrate that the proposed model achieves high efficiency without any preprocessing. The automatic signal classifier developed in this study can be directly applied to various safety monitoring problems, not only mines, to improve the efficiency and reliability of monitoring systems.