Area Influence Kriging

This paper presents a modified ordinary kriging technique referred to as the “Area Influence Kriging” (AIK). The method is a simple and practical tool to use for more accurate prediction of global recoverable ore resources in any type of deposit. AIK performs well even in deposits with skewed grade distributions when the ordinary kriging (OK) results are unreasonably smooth. It is robust and globally unbiased like OK. The AIK method is not intended to replace OK, which is a better estimator of the average grade of the blocks. Rather it aims to complement OK with its excellent performance in predicting recoverable resources that have been the major pitfalls of OK in many resource estimation cases. The paper details the methodology of AIK with a couple of examples. It also reports the results from its application to a gold deposit.