Mineral Prospectivity Mapping in Xiahe-Hezuo Area Based on Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty

The Xiahe-Hezuo area in Gansu Province, China, located in the West Qinling Metallogenic Belt, is characterized by complex regional geological structures and abundant mineral resources. A number of gold-polymetallic deposits have been identified in this region, demonstrating significant potential for gold-polymetallic mineral prospecting within the metallogenic belt. This study focuses on regional Mineral Prospectivity Mapping (MPM) in the Xiahe-Hezuo area. To address the common challenge of small-sample data limitations in geological prediction, we introduce a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) to generate high-fidelity geological feature samples, effectively expanding the training dataset. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was used to train and predict on both pre- and post-augmentation data. The experimental results show that, before augmentation, the CNN model's Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) value was 0.9648. After data augmentation with the WGAN-GP, the CNN model's ROC value improved to 0.9792. Additionally, the CNN model's classification performance was significantly enhanced, with the training set accuracy increasing by 5% and the test set accuracy improving by 2%, successfully overcoming the issue of insufficient model generalization caused by small sample sizes. The mineralization prediction results based on data augmentation delineate five prospective mineralization targets, whose spatial distribution exhibits strong correlations with known deposits and fault structural belts, confirming the reliability of the predictions. This study validates the effectiveness of data augmentation techniques in MPM and provides a transferable technical framework for MPM in data-scarce regions.