Predicting seismic events in coal mines based on underground sensor measurements

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of safety monitoring in underground coal mines. In particular, we investigate and compare practical methods for the assessment of seismic hazards using analytical models constructed based on sensory data and domain knowledge. For our case study, we use a rich data set collected during a period of over five years from several active Polish coal mines. We focus on comparing the prediction quality between expert methods which serve as a standard in the coal mining industry and state-of-the-art machine learning methods for mining high-dimensional time series data. We describe an international data mining challenge organized to facilitate our study. We also demonstrate a technique which we employed to construct an ensemble of regression models able to outperform other approaches used by participants of the challenge. Finally, we explain how we utilized the data obtained during the competition for the purpose of research on the cold start problem in deploying decision support systems at new mining sites.