Development of an Optimized Regression Model to Predict Blast-Driven Ground Vibrations

Ground vibrations caused by blasting operations in cement canisters is among the main mining issues that cause significant disruptions to nearby buildings and infrastructure. This research was performed in a limestone quarry situated southeast of Helwan City, Egypt, to investigate the impact of ground motion vibration due to cement blast action in limestone rocks. To reduce the environmental impact of quarry blasting, continuous monitoring, and accurate medium's peak particle velocity (PPV) assessment are required. Recently, machine learning (ML) models are employed in diverse applications. The default hyperparameters of such models must be modified to fit the problem concerned. The hyperparameters optimization for ML models impacts the employed model's performance and efficiency. In this research, different regression models are implemented for predicting the PPV values. A dataset representing 1438 blast incidents in the Helwan area was built and utilized to evaluate the considered ML models. This dataset incorporates the relationship of the ground vibration amplitude to both the explosive charge weight per delay and distance from the blast. The predictive models' output performance has been evaluated using the root-mean-squared error (RMSE) and the coefficient of determination (R^2). The PPV dataset has been divided into training and testing data to produce statistically significant results and to make the dataset more representative to avoid overfitting. The utilized test PPV dataset acts as a proxy for any new PPV data prediction. There was evidence of higher performance in the developed Decision Trees model with the lowest RMSE and the highest R^2 on training and testing data. The decision tree is, therefore, an acceptable algorithm for the construction of a predictive PPV model for other quarry blasting areas with conditions identical to those in Helwan. Finally, comparative experimental results have shown that optimized models can predict PPV values with lower errors and greater prediction accuracy.