Comparison of Kriging and Neural Networks With Application to the Exploitation of a Slate Mine

To carry out an efficient and effective exploitation of a slate mine, it is necessary to have detailed information about the production potential of the site. To assist us in estimating the quality of slate from a small set of drilling data within an unexploited portion of the mine, the following estimation techniques were applied: kriging, regularization networks (RN), multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks, and radial basis function (RBF) networks. Our numerical results for the test holes show that the best results were obtained using an RN (kriging) which takes into account the known anisotropy. Differing deposit configurations were obtained, depending on the method applied. Variations in the form of pockets were obtained when using a radial pattern with RBF, RN, and kriging models while a stratified pattern was obtained with the MLP model. Pockets are more suitable for a slate mine, which indicates that the selection of a technique should take account of the specific configuration of the deposit according to mineral type.