DOI: 10.3390/s26134126 ISSN: 1424-8220

Interpretable Event-Driven Multisensor Risk-Evolution Analysis for Methane Early Warning

Shuze Li, Yang Yang, Zhilei Wu, Rong Xiao

Methane exceedance events in underground coal mines are often associated with progressive multisensor abnormal evolution processes involving operational, ventilation, environmental, and methane-drainage subsystems. Existing studies primarily focus on methane concentration prediction and provide limited interpretability regarding how abnormal evolution patterns emerge before threshold exceedance. To address this limitation, this study proposes an interpretable event-driven multisensor risk-evolution analysis framework for methane early warning. Methane exceedance events are first extracted from multisensor monitoring data, and a continuous multisensor risk representation together with a persistence-based trigger mechanism is developed to identify sustained abnormal evolution prior to methane exceedance. Event-specific temporal dependency networks are then constructed using lagged dependency analysis to characterize multisensor interaction structures within event windows. Representative evolution paths and recurrent critical variables are further identified to reveal interpretable abnormal evolution patterns. Experiments conducted on a real underground coal mine monitoring dataset containing 784 methane exceedance events demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved the highest early-warning performance among all compared baselines. Under the Any-Target-Sensor criterion, the framework attained an effective warning rate of 0.848 and significantly outperformed benchmark methods in event-level McNemar tests (p < 0.001). The results further indicate that methane exceedance events are generally associated with structured multisensor abnormal evolution processes rather than isolated methane fluctuations, providing an interpretable system-level perspective for methane early warning.

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