Multistep prediction of CO in the extraction zone based on a fully connected long short-term memory network

[Objective] Spontaneous coal combustion is one of the major natural disasters in coal mining; thus, accurate prediction of the risk of spontaneous coal combustion is crucial to prevent and control coal fire disasters. However, the complexity of the physicochemical process of spontaneous coal combustion and its various influencing factors poses a challenge to the risk prediction of spontaneous coal combustion. Strengthening research on spontaneous coal combustion hazard prediction technology using deep learning is crucial for improving the intelligent control level of coal mine safety production. [Methods] In this study, CO volume fraction was chosen as the index for spontaneous coal combustion evaluation. A dataset was constructed, and the field observation data were visualized. Next, the dataset was tested for the distribution of eigenvariables, normalized for the distribution of eigenvariables, and normalized for the dataset using kernel density estimation, logarithmic transformation, and maximum-minimum normalization. Finally, three algorithms, namely recurrent neural network (RNN), long short-term memory (LSTM) network, and gated recurrent unit (GRU), were applied to the data mining of spontaneous coal combustion feature information, and a dynamic sequence prediction model of spontaneous coal combustion CO volume fraction was established. During the model construction process, the full connectivity layer and Dropout class were added to prevent overfitting, and the mean square error and three model performance test indicators were introduced to analyze and optimize the model parameters and test the model performance. [Results] The results were presented as follows: (1) The CO volume fraction sequence dataset was established based on the field data of the Dafosi Coal Mine, the model generalization capability was enhanced, and the training time of the model was shortened by preprocessing the dataset. (2) The RNN, LSTM, and GRU models achieved the dynamic prediction of CO with an error of less than 1%. (3) The optimal parameters of the three models were determined from the mean absolute error (MAE), the root mean square error (RMSE), and R2 of the training and validation sets. A comparative study using the model performance evaluation metrics revealed that the LSTM model had the highest prediction accuracy under the same sequence data, followed by the RNN and GRU models. [Conclusions] Using 285 sets of field data, the spontaneous coal combustion CO volume fraction sequence prediction models based on the RNN, LSTM, and GRU algorithms were established. The experimental values of the CO volume fraction were highly consistent with the predicted values, and the prediction error was less than 1%. The model can predict the change in the CO volume fraction in future moments using the dataset. The results reveal that the dynamic time series prediction of CO volume fraction from spontaneous coal combustion using sequence models is possible compared with conventional static models. Moreover, the process of constructing the three models and optimizing the parameters can be employed as a basic study for developing sequence prediction models for other indicator gases. © 2024 Tsinghua University. All rights reserved.