Investigation of general regression neural network architecture for grade estimation of an Indian iron ore deposit

The mineral resource estimation requires accurate prediction of the grade at location from limited borehole information. It plays the dominant role in the decision-making process for investment and development of various mining projects and hence become an important and crucial stage. This paper evaluvates the use of two distinct artificial neural network (ANN)-based models, general regression neural network (GRNN) and multilayer perceptron neural network (MLP NN), to improve the grade estimation from Koira iron ore region in Sundargarh district, Odisha. ANN-based models capture the inherent complex structure of mineral deposits and provide a reliable generalization of the iron grade. The ANN-based approach does not require any preliminary geological study and is free from any statistical assumption on the raw data before its application. The GRNN is a one-pass learning algorithm and does not require any iterative procedure for training less complex structure and requires only one learning parameter for optimization. In this investigation, the spatial coordinates and multiple lithological units were taken as input variables and the iron grade was taken as the output variable. The comparative analysis of these models has been carried out and the results obtained were validated with traditional geostatistical method ordinary kriging (OK). The GRNN model outperforms the other methods, i.e. MLP and OK, with respect to generalization and predictability of the grades at an un-sampled location.