An improved model to predict the water-inrush risk under an unconsolidated confined aquifer based on analytic hierarchy process and information value method

To prevent water inrush hazards of mining under the Quaternary unconsolidated confined aquifer in North China coalfield, it is necessary to build a water inrush prediction model to guarantee coal safety production. The current method of evaluating mining hazards under unconsolidated confined aquifers is easy to fall into the problems of simple superposition of evaluation factors, large subjectivity of the factor selection, and low accuracy of prediction results. In this paper, an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is improved according to contribution of information value method (IVM) to analyze the impact of water inrush factors. The factor weight values are considered in calculating the total information value of IVM to build a coupled AHP-IVM model. The information value of each factor is calculated through IVM, and area under curve (AUC) value is used to rank the factors, to exclude the subjective judgment of the importance of each factor. The geological and hydrogeological data of Qinan coal mine in Huaibei coalfield are analyzed and organized. The results suggest that the coupled AHP-IVM model has an AUC value of 0.8309, indicating its great potential and practical significance for future mining operations.