Soft computing based mathematical models for improved prediction of rock brittleness index

Brittleness index (BI) is an important property of rocks because it is a good index to predict rockburst. Due to its importance, several empirical and soft computing (SC) models have been proposed in the literature based on the punch penetration test (PPT) results. These models are very important as there is no clear-cut experimental means for measuring BI asides the PPT which is very costly and time consuming to perform. This study used a novel Multivariate Adaptive regression spline (MARS), M5P, and white-box ANN to predict the BI of rocks using the available data in the literature for an improved BI prediction. The rock density, uniaxial compressive strength (oc) and tensile strength (ot) were used as the input parameters into the models while the BI was the targeted output. The models were implemented in the MATLAB software. The results of the proposed models were compared with those from existing multilinear regression, linear and nonlinear particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) based models using similar datasets. The coefficient of determination (R2), adjusted R2 (Adj R2), root-mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) were the indices used for the comparison. The outcomes of the comparison revealed that the proposed ANN and MARS models performed better than the other models with R2 and Adj R2 values above 0.9 and least error values while the M5P gave similar performance to those of the existing models. Weight partitioning method was also used to examine the percentage contribution of model predictors to the predicted BI and tensile strength was found to have the highest influence on the predicted BI.