A method for mineral prospectivity mapping integrating C4.5 decision tree, weights-of-evidence and m-branch smoothing techniques: a case study in the eastern Kunlun Mountains, China

In this study, a novel method that integrates C4.5 decision tree, weights-of-evidence and m-branch smoothing techniques was proposed for mineral prospectivity mapping. First, a weights-of-evidence model was used to rank the importance of each evidential map and determine the optimal buffer distance. Second, a classification technique that uses a C4.5 decision tree in data mining was used to construct a decision tree classifier for the grid dataset. Finally, an m-branch smoothing technique was used as a predictor, which transformed the decision tree into a probability evaluation tree. The method makes no conditional independence assumption and can be applied for class imbalanced datasets like those collected during mineral exploration for prospectivity mapping of an area. The traits of comprehensibility, accuracy and efficiency were derived from the C4.5 decision tree. In addition, a case study for iron prospectivity mapping was performed in the eastern Kunlun Mountains, China. Sixty-two Skarn iron deposits and eight evidential maps related to iron mineralization were studied. On the final map, areas of low, moderate and high potential for iron deposit occurrence covered areas of 71,491, 14,298, and 9,532 km², respectively. For the goodness-of-fit test, 91.94 % of the total 62 iron deposits were within a high-potential area, 8.06 % were within a moderate-potential area and 0 % were within a low-potential area. For ten-fold cross-validation, 82.26 % were within a high-potential area, 14.52 % were within a moderate-potential area and 3.22 % were within a low-potential area. To evaluate the predictive accuracy, Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves and Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) were employed. The accuracy of the goodness-of-fit test reached 97.07 %, and the accuracy of the ten-fold cross-validation was 95.10 %. The majority of the iron deposits were within high-potential and moderate-potential areas, which covered a small proportion of the study area.