Change of Support for Estimating Local Block Grade Distributions |
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| Authors: | Xavier Emery |
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| Institution: | (1) Department of Mining Engineering, University of Chile, Santiago, Chile |
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| Abstract: | An important aspect in mineral resource evaluation is the reduction of variance when post-processing the grade distributions
defined on the support (volume) of the available data into distributions defined on the support of the proposed selective
mining units. Although the volume-variance relationship is well understood for the estimation of global grade distributions,
it is still an unsolved issue for local estimation studies based on non-parametric geostatistical methods, such as indicator
kriging, for which the support correction is not inherent to the method. To clarify this relationship, the local change of
support problem is examined in the scope of two parametric models (multi-Gaussian and discrete Gaussian models). It is shown
that the variance reduction factor between point and block-support local distributions depends on the block being considered
and is less than the global variance reduction factor. As a consequence, post-processing the local point-support grade distributions
on the basis of the latter systematically understates the importance of the change of support at the local scale and makes
selective mining appear more economically attractive than it really is. In the light of these results, a methodology is proposed
to post-process the local point-support distributions obtained via non-parametric (indicator) methods into block-support distributions.
An application to simulated data indicates that this methodology provides an accurate estimation at the block support when
dealing with diffusion-type random fields. |
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| Keywords: | Volume-variance relationship Support effect Multi-Gaussian model Discrete Gaussian model Non-parametric geostatistics Mining selectivity |
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