Recovery and grade prediction of pilot plant flotation column concentrate by a hybrid neural genetic algorithm

Today flotation column has become an acceptable means of froth flotation for a fairly broad range of applications, in particular the cleaning of sulfides. Even after having been used for several years in mineral processing plants, the full potential of the flotation column process is still not fully exploited. There is no prediction of process performance for the complete use of available control capabilities. The on-line estimation of grade usually requires a significant amount of work in maintenance and calibration of on-stream analyzers, in order to maintain good accuracy and high availability. These difficulties and the high cost of investment and maintenance of these devices have encouraged the approach of prediction of metal grade and recovery. In this paper, a new approach has been proposed for metallurgical performance prediction in flotation columns using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Despite of the wide range of applications and flexibility of NNs, there is still no general framework or procedure through which the appropriate network for a specific task can be designed. Design and structural optimization of NNs is still strongly dependent upon the designer's experience. To mitigate this problem, a new method for the auto-design of NNs was used, based on Genetic Algorithm (GA). The new proposed method was evaluated by a case study in pilot plant flotation column at Sarcheshmeh copper plant. The chemical reagents dosage, froth height, air, wash water flow rates, gas holdup, Cu grade in the rougher feed, flotation column feed, column tail and final concentrate streams were used to the simulation by GANN. In this work, multi-layer NNs with Back Propagation (BP) algorithm with 8-17-10-2 and 8- 13-6-2 arrangements have been applied to predict the Cu and Mo grades and recoveries, respectively. The correlation coefficient (R) values for the testing sets for Cu and Mo grades were 0.93, 0.94 and for their recoveries were 0.93, 0.92, respectively. The results discussed in this paper indicate that the proposed model can be used to predict the Cu and Mo grades and recoveries with a reasonable error.

MOOC Learner’s Final Grade Prediction Based on an Improved Random Forests Method

Massive Open Online Course(MOOC)has become a popular way of online learning used across the world by millions of people.Meanwhile,a vast amount of information has been collected from the MOOC learners and institutions.Based on the educational data,a lot of researches have been investigated for the prediction of the MOOC learner’s final grade.However,there are still two problems in this research field.The first problem is how to select the most proper features to improve the prediction accuracy,and the second problem is how to use or modify the data mining algorithms for a better analysis of the MOOC data.In order to solve these two problems,an improved random forests method is proposed in this paper.First,a hybrid indicator is defined to measure the importance of the features,and a rule is further established for the feature selection;then,a Clustering-Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique(SMOTE)is embedded into the traditional random forests algorithm to solve the class imbalance problem.In experiment part,we verify the performance of the proposed method by using the Canvas Network Person-Course(CNPC)dataset.Furthermore,four well-known prediction methods have been applied for comparison,where the superiority of our method has been proved.

Estimation of Copper and Molybdenum Grades and Recoveries in the Industrial Flotation Plant Using the Artificial Neural Network

In this paper, prediction of copper and molybdenum grades and their recoveries of an industrial flotation plant are investigated using the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) model. Process modeling has done based on 92 datasets collected at different operational conditions and feed characteristics. The prominent parameters investigated in this network were pH, collector, frother and F-Oil concentration, size percentage of feed passing 75 microns, moisture content in feed, solid percentage, and grade of copper, molybdenum, and iron in feed. A multilayer perceptron neural network, with 10:10:10:4 structure (two hidden layers), was used to estimate metallurgical performance. To obtain the optimal hidden layers and nodes in a layer, a trial and error procedure was done. In training and testing phases, it achieved quite correlations of 0.98 and 0.93 for Copper grade, of 0.99 and 0.92 for Copper recovery, of 0.99 and 0.92 for Molybdenum grade and of 0.99 and 0.94 for Molybdenum recovery prediction, respectively. The proposed neural network model can be applied to determine the most beneficial operational conditions for the expected Copper and Molybdenum grades and their recovery in final concentration of the industrial copper flotation process.

Test of Ordered Multivariate Discrete Selection Model for Average Life Expectancy

At present, there are significant regional differences in average life expectancy among countries in the world. Not only is there a great disparity in average life expectancy, but also the gender difference is positive and negative, and is distributed in a bipolar distribution of “long life in rich countries and short life in poor countries”. This paper analyzes the factors affecting the life grade by using the ordered multivariate discrete selection model and combined with the average life expectancy data of countries all over the world in 2017. The test results show that: 1) The growth of per capita GDP, elderly dependency ratio and the proportion of people using at least basic drinking water services can effectively improve the level of life expectancy;2) The birth rate has an inhibitory effect on the average life expectancy;3) Through model comparison, probit model is more suitable for the analysis of this kind of problems than logit model, and the properties of the obtained model are better.

PerformanceVis:Visual analytics of student performance data from an introductory chemistry course

We present PerformanceVis,a visual analytics tool for analyzing student admission and course performance data and investigating homework and exam question design.Targeting a university-wide introductory chemistry course with nearly 1000 student enrollment,we consider the requirements and needs of students,instructors,and administrators in the design of PerformanceVis.We study the correlation between question items from assignments and exams,employ machine learning techniques for student grade prediction,and develop an interface for interactive exploration of student course performance data.PerformanceVis includes four main views(overall exam grade pathway,detailed exam grade pathway,detailed exam item analysis,and overall exam&homework analysis)which are dynamically linked together for user interaction and exploration.We demonstrate the effectiveness of PerformanceVis through case studies along with an ad-hoc expert evaluation.Finally,we conclude this work by pointing out future work in this direction of learning analytics research.