Recursive Feature Elimination and Neural Networks Applied to the Forecast of Mass and Metallurgical Recoveries in A Brazilian Phosphate Mine

Geometallurgical models are commonly built by combining explanatory variables to obtain the response that requires prediction. This study presented a phosphate plant with three concentration steps: magnetic separation, desliming and flotation, where the yields and recoveries corresponding to each process unit were predicted. These output variables depended on the ore composition and the collector concentration utilized. This paper proposed a solution based on feature engineering to select the best set of explanatory variables and a subset of them able to keep the model as simple as possible but with enough precision and accuracy. After choosing the input variables, two neural network models were developed to simultaneously forecast the seven geometallurgical variables under study: the first, using the best set of variables; and the second, using the reduced set of inputs. The forecasts obtained in both scenarios were compared, and the results showed that the mean squared error and the root mean squared error increase in all output variables evaluated in the test set was smaller than 2.6% when the reduced set was used. The trade-off between simplicity and the quality of the model needs to be addressed when choosing the final neural network to be used in a 3D-block model.