Robust LS-SVM regression for ore grade estimation in a seafloor hydrothermal sulphide deposit

Abstract

Due to the geological complexities of ore body formation and limited borehole sampling, this paper proposes a robust weighted least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) regression model to solve the ore grade estimation for a seafloor hydrothermal sulphide deposit in Solwara 1, which consists of a large proportion of incomplete samples without ore types and grade values. The standard LS-SVM classification model is applied to identify the ore type for each incomplete sample. Then, a weighted K-nearest neighbor (WKNN) algorithm is proposed to interpolate the missing values. Prior to modeling, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to obtain an appropriate splitting for the training and test data sets so as to eliminate the large discrepancies caused by random division. Coupled simulated annealing (CSA) and grid search using 10-fold cross validation techniques are adopted to determine the optimal tuning parameters in the LS-SVM models. The effectiveness of the proposed model by comparing with other well-known techniques such as inverse distance weight (IDW), ordinary kriging (OK), and back propagation (BP) neural network is demonstrated. The experimental results show that the robust weighted LS-SVM outperforms the other methods, and has strong predictive and generalization ability.