A fractal-based outranking approach for integrating geochemical, geological, and geophysical data

This study presents an adaption of outranking techniques, incorporating fractal concepts for mineral prospectivity analysis, in complex geological settings with complicated mineral systems. This study shows that knowledge deficiency in understanding complex mineralisation systems can be redressed by fractal modelling in terms of exploration evidence data classification. Then, the outranking approaches are used to integrate indicator layers derived via multi-disciplinary geospatial data sets for the generation of reliable exploration targets and prospects. To illustrate how the proposed method works and to demonstrate its effectiveness in generating reliable exploration targets, we used a data set for gold mineralisation prospects in the Alut region, NW Iran. There are geochemical, geological, structural, remote sensing, and geophysical layers used for this purpose. Fractal modelling is utilised for classification of different layers and final map.