Comparative study of five machine learning algorithms on prediction of the height of the water-conducting fractured zone in undersea mining

Prediction of water-conducting fractured zone (WCFZ) of mine overburden is the premise for reducing or eliminating water inrush hazards in undersea mining. To obtain a more robust and precise prediction of WCFZ in undersea mining, a WCFZ prediction dataset with 122 cases of fractured zones was constructed. Five machine learning algorithms (linear regression, XGBRegressor, RandomForestRegressor, LineareSVR, and KNeighborsRegressor) were employed to develop five corresponding predictive models, taking multiple factors into account.The optimal parameters for each model are obtained through ten-fold cross-validation (10CV). The model's predictive performance was validated and assessed using two metrics, namely the coefficient of determination (R²) and mean squared error (MSE). A comparison was made with the regression performance of commonly used empirical formulas. The results indicate that the constructed model outperforms reliance solely on theoretical criteria, showing a high R² value of up to 0.925 and a low MSE value of 3.61. The proposed model was validated in a recently established mining area on Sanshan Island, China. It shows low absolute and relative errors of 0.71 m and 2.01%, respectively, between the predicted value from the model and observation result from the field, demonstrating a high level of consistency with on-site conditions. This paves a path to leveraging machine learning algorithms for predicting the height of WCFZ.