Current approaches for predicting mining induced surface subsidence have a drawback in common that they predict the subsidence only on the basis of a physical or mechanical approach irrespective of the practical examples in engineering practice in mining induced surface subsidence.However,these experiences created in engineering practice are of great value and full use should be made of them to establish an approach for predicting mining induced surface subsidence.Therefore,this paper accumulated a lot of practical examples of mining induced surface subsidence,integrated these examples by using adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS)and established an ANFIS-based approach for predicting mining induced surface subsidence.The approach was further tested by using practical examples of mining induced surface subsidence.The results show that the approach can converge quickly,fit the data in very good agreement and make generalization prediction with high accuracy.