Enhanced Genetic Programming Models with Multiple Equations for Accurate Semi-Autogenous Grinding Mill Throughput Prediction

Semi-autogenous grinding (SAG) mills play a pivotal role in the grinding circuit of mineral processing plants. Accurate prediction of SAG mill throughput as a crucial performance metric is of utmost importance. The potential of applying genetic programming (GP) for this purpose has yet to be thoroughly investigated. This study introduces an enhanced GP approach entitled multi-equation GP (MEGP) for more accurate prediction of SAG mill throughput. In the new proposed method multiple equations, each accurately predicting mill throughput for specific clusters of training data are extracted. These equations are then employed to predict mill throughput for test data using various approaches. To assess the effect of distance measures, four different distance measures are employed in MEGP method. Comparative analysis reveals that the best MEGP approach achieves an average improvement of 10.74% in prediction accuracy compared with standard GP. In this approach all extracted equations are utilized and both the number of data points in each data cluster and the distance to clusters are incorporated for calculating the final prediction. Further investigation of distance measures indicates that among four different metrics employed including Euclidean, Manhattan, Chebyshev, and Cosine distance, the Euclidean distance measure yields the most accurate results for the majority of data splits.