Applying Articial Neural Networks to problems in Geology

Ben MacDonell

Articial neural networks: a new method for mineral prospectivity mapping

Training an ANN on geological data to predict parts of an area that are most likely to contain minerals

Detection of hydrocarbon reservoir boundaries using neural network analysis of surface geochemical data

Training an ANN to detect a hydrocarbon reservoir from data collected from soil samples

An articial neural network-based approach to identifying mammalian fossil localities in the Great Divide Basin, Wyoming

Training an ANN to detect locations that may contain fossils from a data set of known fossil locations

Why use an ANN?

Relationships are often not well

understood

Data is often not independent Data can be noisy Collecting data is expensive (need to
generalize)

What is grade estimation?

Given data collected from geological tests, determine where the best place to mine is. Testing can range from satellite imaging, analyzing magnetic elds, to drilling holes.

Why do we need computers to do this?

The amount of data generated by mineral exploration techniques is already far too vast for a human to analyze. The amount of data we need to analyze is continually increasing as new technologies become available.

Current methods

Statistical method - fails when region is

poorly explored.

Fuzzy logic method - requires an expert to

analyze the results.

18 input nodes Structure determined by experiments 1/3 Input 1/3 Validation 1/3 Test

Results

More accurate than the statistical method. Similar to fuzzy logic method (but used 2/3
of the data).

The authors suggested this was because the

ANN is able to respond to critical combinations of parameters, rather than the statistical and fuzzy logic methods which can only increase the prospectivity value.

Problems

They found that the networks performance

degrades when they use more than 18 input nodes but they didnt try to increase the number of hidden nodes. network trained the fastest with a momentum constant of 0. Maybe they didnt do enough tests per value?

Their experiments showed that the

Detection of hydrocarbon reservoir boundaries using neural network analysis of surface geochemical data

Why use an ANN?

The relationship between soil chemistry
and a reservoir is not well understood. expensive, you have to drill holes.

Collecting data the traditional way is

8:10:1 network

Used three parameters to represent ethane content. The current position, and the values of two neighbours

Results

Network successfully categorized 15/16

test patterns

Problems
The network was trained using data collected in November 1996. When it was tested on data collected in July 1996 it categorized only 1/3 of the input patterns. Added an extra input parameter to represent the season. When trained on data from both seasons with the extra parameter the network performed well again. Could have xed this by having the seasonal parameters represent a difference from a control some distance from the reservoir.

We would expect the moisture value to vary between seasons so if a control soil sample is taken from a position that is probably not over the reservoir and is subtracted from all samples we might be able to remove the seasonal variation. However, the ethane concentration is also likely to vary between seasons because the reservoir is now used as storage. But this wouldnt be a problem when exploring a new reservoir.

The whole paper relies on the network being able to generalize but: Arbitrary choice of 10 hidden nodes (no experiments were performed). Didnt use a validation set. Could have improved generalization by: creating a validation set, implementing network pruning, or implementing weight decay.

Bigger problems
3/8 input parameters are ethane concentration values. The authors admit that the experiment relies on the false assumption that ethane will travel vertically up from the reservoir when in reality it will travel the path of least resistance. So it is unlikely to work in practice.

An articial neural network-based approach to identifying mammalian fossil localities in the Great Divide Basin, Wyoming

Identifying fossil-bearing rock requires

expert knowledge of anatomy and geology

Authors attempt to train a network to

identify fossil-bearing rock by training it on data collected from 110 fossil locations

6:12:20:10 network

Structure decided after testing 16 different

network congurations.

Input patterns created from Landsat

images. Used the pixel value at each fossil location.

Network correctly identied 84% of the test set. Two potential localities will be explored in the summer of 2012.

Problems
The authors didnt say what the output nodes represent. Why do they need 10? Chose the structure after 16 tests. Could have used a script to test hundreds of combinations of network parameters. Or used a network pruning technique.

The whole point of the paper is to tell the difference between rocks that contain fossils and rocks that dont contain fossils. They didnt have any input patterns that dont contain fossils. So the network could have simply learned to output highly prospective for any input pattern. Could easily have invented input patterns for nonfossiliferous rocks since only a few specic types of rock can harbor fossils.

Problems

Problems

Since the entire data set consists only of fossiliferous rocks and the test set is a subset of the data set. Then the network is obviously going to output highly prospective for most of the test set. So the results dont tell us anything about the networks ability to predict fossil locations.

Problems
The previous map shows the network locating potentially fossiliferous rock. But after training the network, the authors decided they werent interested in fossils found on ground that wasnt sloped. So they decided that only data with a slope greater than 5 degrees would be input into the network. This constraint would make a network that generally outputs highly prospective appear to be more discerning than it is, when deciding if a location is likely to contain fossiliferous rock.

Potential localities exist around the sloped edges.

Problems with all the papers

All rely on the network generalizing. But none

made any attempt to improve generalization except for a few experiments with structure.

All could benet from implementing network Could have used a small learning constant
since time to train is not an issue.

pruning, weight decay, or more experimenting with the number of hidden nodes.

Questions