GSA-cGAN: A Geospatial-Aware Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network for Mineral Resources Interpolation

초록

In the context of mineral resource exploration, spatial prediction must cope with heterogeneous, non-normal data distributions and limited sampling. While conventional geostatistics and standard machine learning provide baseline estimates, they often suffer from excessive smoothing or fail to capture continuous spatial dependencies. This study proposes a geospatially aware Wasserstein conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GSA-cGAN) to complement existing workflows for multivariate mineral interpolation. The framework augments a baseline cGAN with WGAN-GP for stable adversarial training, CoordConv to encode absolute spatial coordinates and Self-Attention to capture long-range spatial dependencies. Eight model configurations were trained on 272 samples from a mineralized zone in the Taebaek Mountains, Korea, and strictly benchmarked against Ordinary/Universal Kriging and multivariate machine learning baselines (Random Forest, XGBoost). Under the adopted experimental design, the full GSA-cGAN achieved the lowest test root mean squared error and highest coefficient of determination, demonstrating a significant performance improvement over the baselines. Furthermore, distribution analysis confirmed that the model effectively overcomes the smoothing limitations of regression-based methods, generating high-resolution 10 m x 10 m maps that preserve statistical variance, hotspot anomalies, and complex spatial patterns. The results indicate that deep generative models can serve as practical decision-support tools for identifying drilling targets and prioritizing follow-up exploration in geologically complex settings.

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