## 6 Conclusions  
1. The Jurassic coal seams in the Inner Mongolia-Shaanxi border area are middle-deep buried underground and have special overburden strata. We considered five factors (mining method, the ratio of the thickness of hard rock layers and soft rock layers in the bedrock, buried depth, mining height, and working face length) that influence the development of the height of the water-flowing fractured zone. In particular, the ratio of the thickness of the hard rock layers to the thickness of the soft rock layers in the bedrock was selected as a parameter to characterize an overburdened structure. The linear correlation between coal seam mining conditions and parameters and the height of WFFZ is analyzed by the Pearson correlation coefficient, which offers a foundation for developing a prediction model.
2. An SSA-Elman neural network water-flowing fractured zone height prediction model was established using the sparrow search algorithm to optimize the weights and thresholds of the original Elman neural network. This model can fit the nonlinear relationship between the development of the WFFZ and its influencing factors better in the Inner Mongolia-Shaanxi border area.
3. In response to the requirement for accurate water-transmission fissure heights in the middle and deep Jurassic coal seams, we used the MAE and RMSE to quantitatively evaluate the performances of the different models. The results show that the MAE and RMSE of the SSA-Elman neural network model in the evaluation stage are 3.93 and 4.93, respectively, which indicates that this model has the best prediction accuracy compared with traditional calculation methods and prediction models.
4. Using the mining conditions of panel 31110X of Coal Mine A as an engineering example, we obtained a prediction value of 124.9 m using the SSA-Elman neural network model. This has the smallest error of the prediction models compared with the measured value of 126 m, demonstrating that the SSA-Elman neural network model developed in the study is more accurate in predicting the height of the water flowing fractured zone and more closely represents the real situation. Thus, it can provide guidance regarding the water inflow from a mining face and the use of advanced water discharge techniques in the Inner Mongolia-Shaanxi border area.  
Figure 12: Importance scores of input features.  
**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, X.G. and T.M.; methodology, S.L. and T.M.; software, S.L.; validation, X.G., H.X. and J.Y.; formal analysis, X.G.; investigation, C.Z. and X.Z.; resources, J.Y.; data curation, S.L. and C.Z.; writing--original draft preparation, X.G.; writing--review and editing, X.G.; visualization, S.L.; supervision, X.G.; project administration, J.Y.; funding acquisition, J.Y. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
**Funding:** This work was supported by the Natural Science Basic Research Program of Shaanxi (Program No. 2021)LM-10); the Key Research Program of the Education Department of Shaanxi (Program No. 12 JS063).  
**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.  
**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.  
**Data Availability Statement:** The data generated and analyzed in this manuscript are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.  
**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.