Domain Adaptation from Drilling to Geophysical Data for Mineral Exploration

Abstract

This study utilizes domain adaptation to enhance the integration of diverse geoscience datasets, aiming to improve the identification of ore bodies. Traditional mineral exploration methods often face challenges in merging different geoscience data types, which leads to models that do not perform well across varying domains. Domain adaptation is a deep learning strategy aimed at adapting a model developed in one domain (source) to perform well in a different domain (target). To adapt models trained on detailed, labeled drilling data (source) to interpret broader, unlabeled geophysical data (target), Domain-Adversarial Neural Networks (DANNs) were applied, chosen for their robust performance in scenarios where the target domain does not provide labels. This approach was indirectly validated through the minimal overlap between regions identified as candidate ore and borehole locations marked as host rocks, with qualitative validation provided by t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) visualizations showing improved data integration across domains.

Keywords

• domain adaptation
• mineral exploration
• geophysical survey