African Mining September 2019 | Page 53

MINING IN FOCUS  Poor quality and blurry core tray photos will be useless for any image classification and consequently it would be a waste of time. "The success rate of predictions will increase as increasing amounts of data are collected. type, representativeness or quality to be able to solve the problem. For example, poor quality and blurry core tray photos will be useless for any image classification and consequently it would be a waste of time. The old saying, garbage in, garbage out holds true for ML. Care should also be taken to select the correct method, as some techniques are only suitable for particular types of data. Tabled data is referred to as ‘structured data’ in this type of application. The most common geoscience examples would be core logs, multi element assays and other geochemistry results from assays, grab samples and stockpile samples captured in the form of excel spreadsheets or in SQL database platforms. Other types of applicable geological data include LIDAR point clouds, hyperspectral images and seismic sections, to name a few. Along with predicting the presence of metals in rocks, physical properties combined with machine learning have the potential to classify lithologies, characterise hydrothermal alteration, and estimate exploration vectors and geotechnical information in the drill core. www. africanmining.co.za African Mining Publication Common challenges for ML database development are mainly related to source and format. Data used tends to be at multiple resolutions of space and time, with varying degrees of noise, incompleteness, and uncertainties. The process is also based on a number of assumptions, African Mining African Mining  September 2019  51