Application of Machine Learning in Forecasting the Impact of Mining Deformation: A Case Study of Underground Copper Mines in Poland

Abstract

Open access to SAR data from the Sentinel 1 missions allows analyses of long-term ground surface changes. The current data-acquisition frequency of 12 days facilitates the continuous monitoring of phenomena such as volcanic and tectonic activity or mining-related deformations. SAR data are increasingly also used as input data in forecasting phenomena on the basis of machine learning. This article presents the possibility of using selected machine learning algorithms in forecasting the influence of underground mining activity on the ground surface. The study was performed for a mining protective area with a surface of over 500 km2 and located in western Poland. The ground surface displacements were calculated for the period from November 2014 to July 2021, with the use of the Small Baseline Subset (SBAS) method. The forecasts were performed for a total of 22 identified subsidence troughs. Each of the troughs was provided with two profiles, with a total of more than 10,000 identified points. The selected algorithms served to prepare 180-day displacement forecasts. The best results (significantly better than the baseline) were obtained with the ARIMA and Holt models. Linear models also provided better results than the baseline and their performance was very good at up to 2 months forecasting. Tree-based models including their sophisticated ensemble versions: bagging (Random Forest, Extra Trees) and boosting (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, Gradient Boosting, Hist Gradient Boosting) cannot be used for this type of predictions since Decision Trees are not able to extrapolate and thus are not a valid stand-alone tool for forecasting in this type of problems. A combination of satellite remote sensing data and machine learning facilitated both the simultaneous quasi-permanent monitoring of ground surface displacements and their forecasting in a relatively long time period.