The karst collapse,as most widespread geological disasters and environmental geological problems in karst areas in the world,has had a serious hazard for the development of human society and the construc-tion of engineering projects as well as other aspects.Since the 1 970s,both domestic and foreign scholars have done a lot of works on fields as development regularity,distribution characteristics,collapse cause,ge-netic mechanism,survey techniques,control measures,monitoring and forecasting as well as simulation of karst collapse,which have achieved abundant research results.Being buried deep below the surface and diffi-cult to be detected and probed,karst collapse is of the following features as sudden,concealment,multiple influence factors,uncertainty and ambiguity,so the unified,systematic and authoritative theory and under-standing on the mechanism and quantitative prediction of karst collapse are still in gradually perfecting process.Based on the mechanism of karst collapse status and development trend,from the perspective of complexity science,the basic scientific questions of the mechanism and quantitative prediction as well as quantitative study methods are discussed in this paper.On the basis of referencing multi-technical methods from several related subjects,in order to enrich karst collapse mechanism quantitative research,this paper has methodized the contents of quantitative research,explored the quantitative research methods,analyzed quantitative research techniques and put forth research approaches.