Reliable prediction of drainage flow rate and drainage chemistry is essential to the treatment of drainage from waste rock storages at mine sites. The traditional predictive models require simplification and assumption of geo-bio-chemical processes followed by intensive characterization, and sometimes lead to poor prediction accuracy. In the big data era, various sensors are installed in field to constantly monitor mine sites, which enables machine learning to utilize the generated monitoring data and study the underlying pattern behind the data. This chapter describes an approach to use artificial neural network to predict the drainage flow rate and drainage chemistry based on weather monitoring data collected at mine sites. The advantage of this approach is that generally no additional characterization are required to make prediction because the relevant geo-bio-chemical mechanisms are embedded naturally in the monitoring data, which can be captured through machine learning process.
Part of the book: Deep Learning Applications