Prediction of flyrock in open pit blasting operation using machine learning method

Flyrock is one of the most hazardous events in blasting operation of surface mines. There are several empirical methods to predict flyrock. Low performance of such models is due to the complexity of flyrock analysis. Existence of various effective parameters and their unknown relationships are the main reasons for inaccuracy of the empirical models. Presently, the application of new approaches such as artificial intelligence is highly recommended. In this paper, an attempt has been made to predict flyrock in blasting operations of Soungun Copper Mine, Iran incorporating rock properties and blast design parameters using support vector machine (SVM) method. To investigate the suitability of this approach, the predictions by SVM have been compared with multivariate regression analysis (MVRA), too. Coefficient of determination (CoD) and mean absolute error (MAE) were taken as performance measures. It was found that CoD between measured and predicted flyrock was 0.948 and 0.440 by SVM and MVRA, respectively, whereas MAE between measured and predicted flyrock was 3.11 and 7.74 by SVM and MVRA, respectively.