Comparative Study of Data Mining Techniques for Predicting Explosions in Coal Mines

Global warming is a long-term environmental hazard demonstrated by a gradual increase in the temperature of the Earth. It is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and methane. Although, in terms of the volume, methane is considered secondary to carbon dioxide, it is about 21 times more damaging when compared over a 100-year period. Fugitive methane emissions from underground coal mines significantly contribute to global warming. Amongst all the known methods to reduce the fugitive methane, application of thermal oxidation (or, simply, burning) is deemed the most effective and practical. This process produces water vapour and carbon dioxide, which has significantly lower adverse impact on the atmosphere than methane. The thermal oxidisers operate at high temperatures, which may introduce a risk of fire and explosion to the mine. In order to mitigate such risk, a thorough understanding of the methane explosion characteristics is essential. Methane fire and explosion experiments under conditions pertinent to underground coal mines are expensive, risky and necessitate significant effort, and thus require enormous preparation and safety procedures. It is cheaper and safer to analyse existing data to discover patterns and predict explosions than to conduct new extensive experiments. In this paper, we present a comparative study of data mining and machine learning techniques used for these purposes.