Abstract: The abnormal change of the air volume in the ventilation system caused by the change of the roadway caving or deformation,the door opening or damage,the transportation vehicle blocking and so on is called the mine ventilation system resistance variant fault.According to the monitoring value of roadway air volume after the fault,the fault location and fault amount can be diagnosed by artificial intelligence methods such as support vector machine (SVM) and genetic algorithm (GA).The core problem is how to determine the minimum number and locations of sensors installed underground.Through the fault diagnosis simulation experiment of the actual mine and the field experiment of the metal mine,a method of optimizing the installation position of the wind speed sensor based on the attribute reduction algorithm of the neighborhood rough set without prior knowledge is proposed.According to the importance of the roadway air volume to the fault position and the fault amount,the reduction branch obtained is the optimal position of the sensor to be installed.The research shows that the number of sensors is related to the size of artificial neighborhood radius.The larger the neighborhood radius is,the more sensors are installed,and the higher the accuracy of fault diagnosis is.A broom model is proposed to describe the optimal relationship among the value of λ,neighborhood radius,sensor location,wind resistance value of the branch where the sensor is located and the accuracy of fault diagnosis.The branch with larger wind resistance forms the broom handle,and the branch with smaller wind resistance forms the broom head.The broom model requires that the sensor should be preferentially arranged on the broom handle with larger wind resistance value.The shape of the broom model is related to the value of λ.The larger the value of λ is,the smaller the neighborhood radius is,the smaller the broom head is,that is to say,the fewer the number of sensors.The smaller the neighborhood radius is,the larger the broom head is,that is to say,the more sensors there are.The research results provide a new method to determine the installation position of wind speed sensor,and realize the identification of mine ventilation system resistance variant fault by using less wind speed sensor monitoring data.