Interpretable AutoML for Predicting Unsafe Miner Behaviors via Psychological-Contract Signals

Abstract

Occupational safety in high-risk sectors, such as mining, depends heavily on understanding and predicting workers’ behavioural risks. However, existing approaches often overlook the psychological dimension of safety, particularly how psychological-contract violations (PCV) between miners and their organizations contribute to unsafe behavior, and they rarely leverage interpretable artificial intelligence. This study bridges that gap by developing an explainable AutoML framework that integrates AutoGluon, SHAP, and LIME to classify miners’ safety behaviors using psychological and organizational indicators. An empirically calibrated synthetic dataset of 5000 miner profiles (20 features) was used to train multiclass (Safe, Moderate, and Unsafe) and binary (Safe and Unsafe) classifiers. The WeightedEnsemble_L2 model achieved the best performance, with 97.6% accuracy (multiclass) and 98.3% accuracy (binary). Across tasks, Post-Intervention Score, Fatigue Level, and Supervisor Support consistently emerge as high-impact features. SHAP summarizes global importance patterns, while LIME provides per-case rationale, enabling auditable, actionable guidance for safety managers. We outline ethics and deployment considerations (human-in-the-loop review, transparency, bias checks) and discuss transfer to real-world logs as future work. Results suggest that interpretable AutoML can bridge behavioural safety theory and operational decision-making by producing high-accuracy predictions with transparent attributions, informing targeted interventions to reduce unsafe behaviours in high-risk mining contexts.