Assessment of the ground vibration during blasting in mining projects using different computational approaches

The investigation compares the conventional, advanced machine, deep, and hybrid learning models to introduce an optimum computational model to assess the ground vibrations during blasting in mining projects. The long short-term memory (LSTM), artificial neural network (ANN), least square support vector machine (LSSVM), ensemble tree (ET), decision tree (DT), Gaussian process regression (GPR), support vector machine (SVM), and multilinear regression (MLR) models are employed using 162 data points. For the first time, the blackhole-optimized LSTM model has been used to predict the ground vibrations during blasting. Fifteen performance metrics have been implemented to measure the prediction capabilities of computational models. The study concludes that the blackhole optimized-LSTM model PPV11 is highly capable of predicting ground vibration. Model PPV11 has assessed ground vibrations with RMSE = 0.0181 mm/s, MAE = 0.0067 mm/s, R = 0.9951, a20 = 96.88, IOA = 0.9719, IOS = 0.0356 in testing. Furthermore, this study reveals that the prediction accuracy of hybrid models is less affected by multicollinearity because of the optimization algorithm. The external cross-validation and literature validation confirm the prediction capabilities of model PPV11. The ANOVA and Z tests reject the null hypothesis for actual ground vibration, and the Anderson–Darling test rejects the null hypothesis for predicted ground vibration. This study also concludes that the GPR and LSSVM models overfit because of moderate to problematic multicollinearity in assessing ground vibration during blasting.