Prediction of Methane Outbreak in Coal Mines from Historical Sensor Data under Distribution Drift

We describe our submission to the IJCRS’15 Data Mining Competition, where the objective is to predict methane outbreaks from multiple sensor readings. Our solution exploits a selective naive Bayes classifier, with optimal preprocessing, variable selection and model averaging, together with an automatic variable construction method that builds many variables from time series records. One challenging part of the challenge is that the input variables are not independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) between the train and test datasets, since the train data and test data rely on different time periods. We suggest a methodology to alleviate this problem, that enabled to get a final score of 0.9439 (team marcb), second among the 50 challenge competitors .