Machine Learning Methods for Quantifying Uncertainty in Prospectivity Mapping of Magmatic-Hydrothermal Gold Deposits: A Case Study from Juruena Mineral Province, Northern Mato Grosso, Brazil
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mineral prospectivity mapping (MPM), like other geoscience fields, is subject to a variety of uncertainties. When data about unfavorable sites to find deposits (i.e., drill intersections to barren rocks) is lacking in MPM using machine learning (ML) methods, the synthetic generation of negative datasets is required. As a result, techniques for selecting point locations to represent negative examples must be employed. Several approaches have been proposed in the past; however, one can never be certain that the points chosen are true negatives or, at the very least, optimal for training. As a consequence, methodologies that account for the uncertainty of the generation of negative datasets in MPM are needed. In this paper, we compare two criteria for selecting negative examples and quantify the uncertainty associated with this process by generating 400 potential maps for each of the three ML methods utilized (200 maps for each criterion), which include random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and k-nearest neighbors (KNC). The results showed that applying a geological constraint to the creation of negative datasets reduced prediction uncertainty and improved overall model performance but produced larger areas of very high probability (i.e., >0.9) when compared to using only the spatial distribution of known deposits and occurrences as a constraint. SHAP values were used to find approximations for the importance of features in nonlinear methods, and kernel density estimations were used to examine how they varied depending on the negative dataset used to train the ML models. Prospectivity models for magmatic-hydrothermal gold deposits were generated using data from the shuttle radar terrain mission, gamma-ray, magnetic lineaments, and proximity to dykes. The Juruena Mineral Province, situated in Northern Mato Grosso, Brazil, represented the case study for this work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".