Novel ensemble intelligence methodologies for rockburst assessment in complex and variable environments

Abstract Rockburst is a severe geological hazard that restricts deep mine operations and tunnel constructions. To overcome the shortcomings of widely used algorithms in rockburst prediction, this study investigates the ensemble trees, i.e., random forest (RF), extremely randomized tree (ET), adaptive boosting machine (AdaBoost), gradient boosting machine, extreme gradient boosting machine (XGBoost), light gradient boosting machine, and category gradient boosting machine, for rockburst estimation based on 314 real rockburst cases. Additionally, Bayesian optimization is utilized to optimize these ensemble trees. To improve performance, three combination strategies, voting, bagging, and stacking, are adopted to combine multiple models according to training accuracy. ET and XGBoost receive the best capabilities (85.71% testing accuracy) in single models, and except for AdaBoost, six ensemble trees have high accuracy and can effectively foretell strong rockburst to prevent large-scale underground disasters. The combination models generated by voting, bagging, and stacking perform better than single models, and the voting 2 model that combines XGBoost, ET, and RF with simple soft voting, is the most outstanding (88.89% testing accuracy). The performed sensitivity analysis confirms that the voting 2 model has better robustness than single models and has remarkable adaptation and superiority when input parameters vary or miss, and it has more power to deal with complex and variable engineering environments. Eventually, the rockburst cases in Sanshandao Gold Mine, China, were investigated, and these data verify the practicability of voting 2 in field rockburst prediction.