Application of Computers and Operations Research in the Mineral Industry –

Dessureault, Ganguli, Kecojevic & Dwyer (eds)

© 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 04 1537 449 9

Estimation of structural response to mining-induced blast vibration using

support vector machines

Yang Cheng-Xiang
School of Resources & Civil Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China

Feng Xia-Ting
Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China

ABSTRACT: This study applies support vector machines (SVM) to develop a highly nonlinear mapping
relationship between the Peak Particle Velocity (PPV) induced in structures and the affecting factors from data
taken from field measurements and real structures to predict the structural response to mining-induced blast
vibration. In addition, this study examines the feasibility of applying SVMs in the analysis of blast-induced
structural vibration response by comparing it with back-propagation neural networks. The application results
show that SVM provides a promising alternative for solving the vibration related problems.

1 INTRODUCTION input variables through processing units, whose high

When blasting takes place in opencast or underground
mines, damages of adjacent structures may be caused
by the induced vibration, which transmits through the
ground and create a dynamic response in structures.
The general conclusion in mining engineering is that
the peak particle velocity (PPV) is an appropriate
index for assessing damaging ground motions to struc-
tures (Nicholls et al. 1971). The PPV of the structures
induced by blast vibration is estimated through empiri-
cal equations, which often result in discrepancies with
real values (Yang et al. 1994, Richards et al. 1994).
This is due primarily to the fact that they exclude the
effects of structural type, structural conditions, site
conditions, ground vibration frequency contents and
ground vibration duration on structural responses. In
fact, the characteristics of structural response are very
difficult to identify because of the complexities of such
effecting factors (Wingh et al. 1996, Pijush 1998).
In this case the experimentally supported analysis
can be superior to the computational analysis, which
can be very complex and inaccurate because of dif-
ficulties with material, structural and load modelling.
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) provide a rich, pow-
erful and robust nonparametric modelling framework
with proven and potential applications across sciences.
ANN has proved itself to be a promising tool for solv-
ing the vibration related problems with data taken
from measurements on real structures (Tienfuan &
David 2002, Kuźniar & Waszczyszyn 2003). Essen-
tially, ANN are highly parametric functions of the
connectivity makes them suitable for describing com-
plex input-output mappings without resorting to a
physical description of the phenomenon.
From among many applications, gradient tech-
niques are most commonly used for network training,
typically some variation of back propagation (BP)
(Wong et al. 1995). However, the BP neural network
suffers from a number of weaknesses which include
the need for a large number of controlling parameters,
difficulty in obtaining a stable solution and the dan-
ger of over fitting (Curry & Morgan 1997, Jasmina &
Ramazan 2001, Paulo et al. 2002). The over-fitting
problem usually leading to poor generalization could
present serious problems in real-world applications
because the neural network has too large a capacity
which causes it to capture not only the useful informa-
tion contained in the training data but also unwanted
noises. As a result, it will end up only memorizing the
training data and generalizing poorly to the unseen
data. This issue of generalization has long been a
concern to researchers. Many efforts have been made
for enhancing the generalization ability of neural net-
works but most of these methods usually involve a
substantial amount of computation.
Recently, Support Vector Machines (SVM) as a
novel type of neural networks have been developed by
Vapnik (1995) and are gaining popularity due to many
attractive features, and promising empirical perfor-
mance. SVMs are based on the Structural Risk Mini-
mization (SRM) principle, which has been shown to be
superior (Burges 1998), to traditional Empirical Risk

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 Minimization (ERM) principle, employed by con-
ventional neural networks. SRM minimizes an upper
bound on the Vapnik–Chervonenkis (VC) dimension
(‘generalization error’), as opposed to ERM that min-
imizes the error on the training data. This induction
principle is based on the fact that the generalization
error is bounded by the sum of the training error and
a confidence interval term that depends on the VC
dimension. Based on SRM principle, SVMs achieve an
optimum network structure by striking a right balance
between the empirical error and the VC-confidence
interval. This incorporates capacity control to prevent
over-fitting and eventually results in better generaliza-
tion performance than other neural network models.
Another merit of SVMs is that the training of SVMs is
equivalent to solving a quadratic programming prob-
lem with linear equality and inequality constraints
rather than a non-convex, unconstrained optimiza-
tion problem. Consequently, the solution of SVMs is
always unique and globally optimal without the danger
of getting stuck into local minima. In addition, the flex-
ibility of kernel functions allows the SVM to search a
wide variety of hypothesis spaces. Due to its remark-
able generalization performance, SVM has received
increasing attention in areas ranging from its origi-
nal application of pattern recognition (Burges 1998)
to the extended application of regression estimation
(Smola & Schölkopf 1998).
In the current paper, we apply SVM for regression
estimation to approximate the highly nonlinear map-
ping relationship between the Peak Particle Velocity
(PPV) induced in structures and the affecting fac-
tors from data taken from measurements on field and
real structures to predict the structural response to
mining-induced blast vibration. We will compare the
performance of SVM and a BP neural network to
study the feasibility of applying SVMs in the anal-
ysis of blast-induced structural vibration response.
Some experiments are also carried out to investigate
the variability in performance with respect to the free
parameters of SVMs.
2 THEORY OF SVMS
SVMs have originally been developed to solve classi-
fication problems but their principles can be extended
easily to the task of regression by the introduction of an
alternative loss function modified to include a distance
measure. This section focuses on some highlights
representing crucial elements in using this method.
Details of support vector algorithms and tutorials can
be found in (Burges 1998, Smola & Schölkopf 1998,
Schölkopf & Smola 2002, Cristianini & Shawe-Taylor
2000, Campbell 2002, Suykens et al. 2002).
Given training set (x1 , y1 ), (x2 , y2 ), …, (xl , yl )
(xi ∈ X ⊆ Rn , yi , ∈ Y ⊆ R, l is the total number of
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Copyright © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
training samples), SVMs solves the regression prob-
lem using the following function:
where (x) is the high dimensional feature space
which is non-linearly mapped from the input space X ,
which extend the approach to nonlinear functions. The
best coefficients w and b are estimated by minimizing
the following regularized risk function:
where the first term is a penalty function which
penalizes the empirical errors larger than ±ε using
a so-called ε-insensitive loss function Lε for each of
the l training points.
The second term, on the other hand, is the regular-
ization term that is used to regularize weight sizes
and penalizes large weights. Due to this regularization,
the weights converge to smaller values. Large weights
deteriorate the generalization ability of the SVM
because, usually, they can cause excessive variance.
The positive constant C is referred to as the regular-
ized constant and it controls the trade-off between the
empirical risk and the regularization term by deter-
mining the amount up to which deviations from ε are
tolerated. Increasing the value of C will result in the
relative importance of the empirical risk with respect
to the regularization term to grow. ε is called the tube
size and it is equivalent to the approximation accuracy
placed on the training data points. Both C and ε have
to be chosen by the user and the optimal values are
usually data and problem dependent.
By introducing the positive slack variables ζi and ζi∗
to denote the errors larger than ±ε, the cost function
given by Equation 2 was transformed to the so-called
primal function:
This loss function provides the advantage of enabling
one to use sparse data points to represent the decision
function given by Equation 1. Figure 1 shows the use
of the slack variables and the linear ε-insensitive loss
function that are used throughout this paper.

ζ +ε
ζ
0 (.)
-ε
+ε 0 -ε
Figure 1. The ε-insensitive loss function (only the black dots
located on or outside the tube (support vectors) contribute to
the cost.
Finally, by applying Lagrangian theory and exploit-
ing the optimality constraints, the decision function
given by Equation 1 has the following explicit form:
In this formula, αi and α∗i are Lagrange multipliers
associated with a specific training point and can be
obtained by solving the following dual optimization
problem:
Because of the specific formulation of the cost func-
tion and the use of the Lagrangian theory, the solution
has several interesting properties.
• Globality. The solution found is always global
because the problem formulation is convex (Burges
1998).
• Uniqueness. The solution found is also unique if the
cost function is strictly convex.
• Sparseness. Only a sparse number of training points
lying on or outside the ε-bound of the decision func-
tion contribute to the solution found because the
Lagrange multipliers of other data points are all
equal to zero.
• Dimension-free. The dimension of the input
becomes irrelevant in the solution (due to the use
of the inner product).
Training points with nonzero Lagrange multipli-
ers are called support vectors and give shape to
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Copyright © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
Σ output Σ wi K (x, xi) + b
w1 w2 wm weights
(.) ••• (.) dot product (Φ(x).(xi)) = K (x,xi)
Φ(x1) Φ(x2) Φ(x) ••• Φ(xn) mapped vectors Φ(xi), Φ(x)
x1 x2 ••• xn support vectors x1 ... xn
x input vector x
Figure 2. Architecture of a support vector regression.
the solution. The smaller the fraction of support vec-
tors, the more general the obtained solution is and less
computations are required to evaluate the solution for
a new and unknown object. However, many support
vectors do not necessarily result in an over-trained
solution. Generally, the larger the ε, the fewer the
number of support vectors and thus the sparser the rep-
resentation of the solution. However, a larger ε can also
depreciate the approximation accuracy placed on the
training points. In this sense, ε is a trade-off between
the sparseness of the representation and closeness to
the data.
In Equation 4, K is the so-called kernel function.
The value of the kernel is equal to the inner prod-
uct of two vectors xi and xj in the feature space (xi )
and (xj ), that is, K(xi , xj ) = (xi ) ∗ (xj ) . This sim-
plify the use of the map (x) by dealing with feature
spaces of arbitrary dimensionality without having to
compute it explicitly and the problem is reduced to
finding kernels that identify families of regression
formulas. Any function satisfying Mercer’s condi-
tion (Schölkopf & Smola 2002) can be used as the
kernel function. The most used kernel functions are
the polynomial kernel K(x, y) = (x ∗ y + 1)d and the
Gaussian kernel K(x, y) = exp(−1/δ2 (x − y)2 ) where
d is the degree of polynomial kernel and δ2 is the
bandwidth of the Gaussian kernel. The kernel param-
eter should be carefully chosen as it implicitly defines
the structure of the high dimensional feature space
(x) and thus controls the complexity of the final
solution.
From the implementation point of view, training
SVMs is equivalent to solving a linearly constrained
quadratic programming (QP) with the number of
variables twice as that of the training data points.
The sequential minimal optimization algorithm pro-
pounded by Scholkopf and Smola (Smola & Schölkopf
1998, Schölkopf & Smola 2002) is reported to be
very effective in training SVMs for solving the regres-
sion problem. Figure 2 contains a graphical overview
over the different steps in the regression stage. The
input pattern (for which a prediction should be made)
 Table 1. Research data used in this study.

Compacted ground Structure

Total charge Maximum charge Distance PPV Frequency Frequency Height PPV structure
(kg) per delay (kg) (m) (mm/s) (Hz) Type∗ (Hz) difference (m) (mm/s)

14350.00 1800.00 940 4.03 5 BC 5 0.92 5.37

56875.00 5600.00 3000 1.596 5 BMC 15 0.76 1.640
19528.00 5200.00 1450 3.73 5 BMC 5 0.92 4.03
632.75 382.00 325 2.41 9 CN 8 0.61 2.48
2137.50 737.50 300 13.72 9 CN 9 0.61 14.73
1350.00 187.50 130 15.00 15 BC 12 4.0 40.10
1350.00 187.50 118 21.9 16 BC 12 3.05 55.9
731.50 300.00 312 2.00 15 BC 15 2.44 8.90
775.00 225.00 450 0.67 25 BMC 17 1.2 1.312
2150.00 445.00 1380 0.445 5 M 9 2.44 0.925
4520.84 645.00 1190 0.880 7 BC 8 3.65 1.978
2029.30 764.40 120 11.78 6 BC 7 0.76 14.90
1825.00 650.00 200 9.99 7 BC 8 0.76 11.33
260.13 140.70 145 6.71 12 BC 15 3.20 14.32
230.25 118.75 128 7.75 10 M 18 2.74 12.82
1925.00 175.00 135 10.36 28 CN 25 3.76 27.29
390.00 65.00 350 0.60 7 BMC 5 1.22 1.19
1237.50 225.00 400 4.03 7 BC 5 3.96 12.53
1475.00 337.50 250 3.88 5 BC 7 1.52 10.59
125.00 41.70 275 0.65 32 BC 27 1.83 1.64
712.50 50.00 115 5.22 10 BMC 7 3.66 7.01
2300.00 50.00 230 0.89 5 BC 7 3.05 3.53
2300.00 50.00 240 1.49 8 BC 10 7.0 9.84
2268.48 200.16 850 0.25 22 BC 16 3.66 0.60
2637.50 250.00 100 7.61 7 BC 7 4.57 31.62
2443.75 125.00 120 8.35 8 BC 8 1.78 21.62
2443.75 125.00 110 7.01 17 BC 20 1.40 9.54
530.00 80.00 200 4.18 35 BC 17 3.05 7.61
798.00 114.00 225 9.91 20 BMC 15 3.50 16.26

is mapped into feature space by a map . Then dot

products are computed with the images of the training
patterns under the map . This corresponds to evaluat-
ing kernel K functions at locations K(xi , x). Finally the
dot products are added up using the weights αi − α∗i .
This, plus the constant term b yields the final predic-
tion output. The process described here is very similar
to regression in a three-layered neural network, with
the difference, that in the SVMs case the weights in the
input layer are predetermined by the training patterns.
In contrast to the Lagrange multipliers, the choice
of a kernel and its specific parameters and ε and C do
not follow from the optimization problem and have to
be tuned by the user. Except for the choice of the kernel
function, the other parameters can be optimized by the
use ofVapnik–Chervonenkis bounds, cross-validation,
an independent optimization set, or Bayesian learning
(Schölkopf & Smola 2002, Cristianini & Shawe-Taylor
2000, Suykens et al. 2002). Data pretreatment of both
x and y can be options to improve the regression results
just as in other regression methods but this has to be
investigated for each problem separately.
3 RESEARCH DATA AND IMPLEMENTATION
SETTINGS
3.1 Research data
The research data used in this study was collected from
Pijush (1998) including experimental data from 20
different mines. Since we attempt to predict PPV of
the structures induced by blast vibration, the effects
of structural type, structural conditions, site condi-
tions, ground vibration frequency contents and ground
vibration duration are used as input variables. This
study selects 8 technical indicators to make up the ini-
tial attributes, as determined by the review of domain
experts and prior research (Nicholls et al. 1971, Yang
et al. 1994, Richards et al. 1994, Wingh et al. 1996,
Pijush 1998). There are the total charge, maximum
charge per delay, distance, PPV and frequency of
the compacted ground, structure type (abbreviated
form, see Table 2 for structure type codes), frequency
of structure and the height difference. The data are
presented in Table 1.

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Copyright © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK

 Table 2. Type of structure their respective abbreviated 40
form. Training Testing

Mean squared error

Abbreviated form Index Type of construction 30

BC 1 Brick and cement

construction with concrete 20
roof
BMC 2 Brick1mud and cement 10
plastered with wooden
ceiling
CN 3 Framework structure 0
with reinforced 0
20000 40000 60000 80000 10000
concrete Epochs 0
M 4 Mud structure with tiled roof (a) BP network

50
Training Testing
For the non-numerical input, type of structure in 40

Mean squared error

Table 1, we simply evaluate them with an index number
(as seen in Table 2) since in SVMs the dimension of
the input becomes irrelevant in the solution.
The original data are scaled into the range of [0.1,
0.9]. The goal of linear scaling is to independently
normalize each feature component to the specified
range. It ensures the larger value input attributes do not
overwhelm smaller value inputs, then helps to reduce
prediction errors.
There are a total of 29 data points collected. Four of
these cases (the last four cases in Table 1) are randomly
selected to serve as the testing cases to examine the
generalization capability of SVMs. The others are used
as the training cases to obtain the decision function.
The generalization performance is evaluated using the
mean squared error (MSE):
3.2 Implementation settings
3.2.1 SVM
In this study, the Gaussian radial basis function is
used as the kernel function of SVM because gaussian
kernels tend to give good performance under general
smoothness assumptions. Since the free parameters of
SVM (regularized constant C and tube size ε) and
the kernel parameter (band width δ2 ) play important
roles in the performance of SVMs and there is little
general guidance to determine these parameters, this
study varies the parameters to select optimal values
for the best prediction performance and discusses the
sensibility of SVMs to the parameters. This study uses
the LIBSVM software system (Chang & Lin 2001) to
perform applications.
3.2.2 BP
In this study, standard three-layer BP networks are used
as benchmarks. There are 8 nodes in the input layer and
30
20
10
0
0 50 100 150 200 250
Epochs
(b) SVMs
Figure 3. The behavior of the MSE over training cases and
testing cases.
1 output node according to the real problem. The num-
ber of hidden nodes is selected using trial and error
since the BP network does not have a general rule for
determining the optimal number of hidden nodes. It
was determined that using 18 hidden nodes in the BP
network gives the best performance. During training,
an additional testing procedure on the MSE over test-
ing cases to detect the over-fitting phenomena is used
for the stopping criteria of BP. The learning rate is
set to 0.1 and the momentum term 0.1 according to
experience.
4 RESULTS
In the training of the BP network, over-fitting occurred
at epoch 50, 500 and the corresponding value of MSE
is 12.4. The behavior of the MSE over training cases
and testing cases is given in Figure 3a. The choice of
1/δ2 = 6.28, C = 0.84 and ε = 0.001 in the training of
the SVMs is because these values produced the best
predicting results over the testing cases. As seen in
Figure 3b, the SVMs gave more stable solutions and
have much smaller MSE which is 7.3 than BP. This
indicates that SVMs significantly outperform BP in
training and generalization.

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Copyright © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK

 60
40
PPV(m/s)
20
0 ε = 0.001. A small value of 1/δ2 under-fits the training data
0 10
Case number
Figure 4. Learned and predicted results of SVMs.
60
y = 1.0013x + 0.0769
R2 = 0.9984
Measured PPV(m/s)
40
20
0 and ε are fixed at 0.84 and 0.001 respectively based on
0 20
SVM predicted PPV(m/s)
Figure 5. Linear regression result between the PPV values
for the training and testing cases.
Figure 4 shows the learned and predicted results of
the SVMs, one can note that the SVMs can attain a
satisfied approximation.
Figure 5 shows the linear regression result between
the PPV values for the training and testing cases. It is
noted that the intercept of the straight line is almost
zero and its slope is close to one. The results show that
the prediction is fairly accurate. Therefore, it can be
concluded that SVMs provide a promising technique
in the analysis of structural response to blast induced
vibration.
5 DISCUSSION
As mentioned in section 2, the free parameters of
SVMs and the kernel parameter play important roles
Copyright © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK
200
Measured Training
Mean squared error
Learned 150 Testing
Predicted
100
50
0
0.001 0.01 0.1 1 6.28 10 100 1000
1/δ2
Figure 6. The results of various 1/δ2 in which C = 0.84 and
20 30 while a large value of 1/δ2 over-fits the testing data.
in the performance of SVMs. The regularized con-
stant C controls the trade-off between the empirical
risk and the regularization term while tube size ε is
equivalent to the approximation accuracy placed on the
training data points and controls the trade-off between
the sparseness of the representation and closeness to
the data. Both C and ε are usually data and prob-
lem dependent. The kernel parameter δ2 implicitly
defines the structure of the high dimensional feature
space and thus controls the complexity of the final
solution. This section compares the prediction per-
formance with respect to various free parameters of
SVMs and discusses how does these parameters affect
on the solutions of SVMs.
Figure 6 gives the MSE over training and testing
cases of SVMs with different values of 1/δ2 while C
40 60 the application results. We can see that the MSE on the
testing cases decreases with 1/δ2 initially but increases
after some certain value of 1/δ2 . That is, a small value
of 1/δ2 will lead to under-fit the training data while a
large value over-fit the training data. In this case, the
value of 6.28 for 1/δ2 is appropriate.
Figure 7 gives the results of various C with 1/δ2 and
ε, respectively, are set to 6.28 and 0.001. The figure
shows that the MSE on the test cases decreases first
and then increases after some certain point and finally
maintains an almost constant value as C increases.This
is because increasing the value of C will result in the
biased importance of the empirical risk, which will
lead to over-fitting. A too large value of C will return
to the ERM problem and stops at the over-fitting result.
Figure 8a gives the results of SVMs at various ε
where 1/δ2 and C are fixed at 6.28 and 0.84 respec-
tively. It can be observed that the MSE on both the
training set and the test set remain stable at small value
of ε but increases at larger ε. This indicates that the
performance of SVMs is insensitive to small value of
ε (0.0001∼0.01) but too large a value of ε (≥0.01)
592
 100 6 CONCLUSION
Training
This paper applies SVMs to model the structural
Mean squared error

Testing
response to blast induced vibration. The highly non-
linear relationship between the PPV in the structures
50 and the blast geometry, blast size, location, monitoring
stations and other relevant aspects was regressed from
the field data. The application results show that SVMs
provide a promising alternative to the BP neural net-
work for blast induced vibration analysis. SVMs give
0 more stable and accurate solutions than the BP network
0.1 0.3 0.5 0.84 1 10 100 both in training and generalization.
Value C
The sensitivity of SVMs to its parameters was also
discussed and the results show that kernel parameter δ2
Figure 7. The results of various C in which 1/δ2 = 6.28 and
ε = 0.001. A small value of C under-fits the training data and regularization constant C play an important role in
while a large value of C over-fits the testing data. the train and especially the generalization performance
of SVMs. The performance of SVMs is insensitive to
a small value of tube size ε while a larger ε will signif-
40
icantly reduce the number of support vectors and lead
to a sparse representation of the solution. But the larger
Mean squared error

30 Training Testing value ε can also depreciate the approximation accuracy

placed on the training cases. Therefore, the parame-
20 ters of SVMs should be carefully chosen according
to their effect on the performance and an extra opti-
mization procedure would be useful which will be the
10
further work.

0
0.00001 0.0001 0.001 0.01 0.1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
ε
(a) The MSE over training and testing cases. The financial support from The Special Funds for
Major State Basic Research Project under Grant no.
2002CB4127008, the Teaching and Research Award
25
Program for Outstanding Young Teachers in Higher
Education Institutions of MOE and the Research Fund
of the Key Laboratory of Rock and Soil Mechanics in
Number of SVs

20 the Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics of CAS under

Grant no. Z110407 are gratefully acknowledged.

15
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