Mapping mineral prospectivity by using one-class support vector machine to identify multivariate geological anomalies from digital geological survey data

Mineral targets are local geological anomalies. In a study area of a number of unit cells, mapping mineral prospectivity can be implemented by identifying anomaly cells from the unit cell population. One-class support vector machine (OCSVM) models can yield useful results in anomaly detection in high-dimensional data or without any assumptions on the distribution of the inlying data. The OCSVM model was applied to mapping gold prospectivity of the Laotudingzi-Xiaosiping district, an area with a complex geological background, in Jilin Province, China. The decision function value of each unit cell belonging to an anomaly was computed on the basis of the trained OCSVM model and used to express gold prospectivity of the cell. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, area under curve (AUC) and data-processing efficiency were used to compare the performance of the OCSVM model and a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) model in mapping gold prospectivity. The results show that the OCSVM model outperforms the RBM model in terms of ROC, AUC and data-processing efficiency. Gold targets were optimally delineated by using the Youden index to maximise the spatial association between the delineated gold targets and known gold deposits. The gold targets delineated by the OCSVM model occupy 11% of the study area and contain 88% of the known gold deposits; and the gold targets delineated by the RBM model occupy 10% of the study area and contain 81% of the known gold deposits. Therefore, the OCSVM model is a feasible mineral prospectivity mapping approach.