Discrimination of Rock Fracture and Blast Events Based on Signal Complexity and Machine Learning

The automatic discrimination of rock fracture and blast events is complex and challenging due to the similar waveform characteristics. To solve this problem, a new method based on the signal complexity analysis and machine learning has been proposed in this paper. First, the permutation entropy values of signals at different scale factors are calculated to reflect complexity of signals and constructed into a feature vector set. Secondly, based on the feature vector set, back-propagation neural network (BPNN) as a means of machine learning is applied to establish a discriminator for rock fracture and blast events. Then to evaluate the classification performances of the new method, the classifying accuracies of support vector machine (SVM), naive Bayes classifier, and the new method are compared, and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves are also analyzed. The results show the new method obtains the best classification performances. In addition, the influence of different scale factor and number of training samples on discrimination results is discussed. It is found that the classifying accuracy of the new method reaches the highest value when = 8–15 or 8–20 and .