Statistical analysis of rock-burst events in underground mines and excavations to present reasonable data-driven predictors

摘要

Rock bursts are sudden and violent failures of surrounding rock-masses in underground mines and excavations. In this paper, a database consisting of 188 case histories was collected. Each case history contains some of the predictor variables 'overburden thickness, maximum tangential stress, uniaxial compressive strength of rock, tensile strength of rock, stress ratio, brittleness ratio and elastic energy index' and one of the four defined classes for the dependent variable 'rock burst intensity'. A strategy, including 'outlier detection and substitution, normality evaluation, deduction of distribution functions, estimation of mean and mean variation ranges, evaluation of mean-equality and distribution function-equality hypotheses, correlation analysis and factor analysis for in-review variables', was implemented. The strategy led to conclude that some predictor variables with available case histories have no contributions for rock burst prediction. These inferences were in accordance with the results of regression techniques for qualitative dependent variables. Besides, many predictor variable arrangements were incompatible with factor analysis. In the case of compatible arrangements, the variation of the predictor variables cannot be considerably reflected. Application of nonlinear principal component analysis using auto-associative neural networks did not also lead to representative components. Therefore, the significant predictor variables can only be used to design new classifiers.