I reviewed the study “Sustainable development of mining areas： Predictive Model-ing of

Mineral Prospectivity by Weight-of- Evidence and Machine-Learning Methods in the

WuZheng-Dao District”.
1. “The” should not written in bold. Abstract: The Wu
2. Some grammatical errors:
• “… shallow deposits decrease.” Should be “decreases”.
3. Motivation in the abstract is not clear. Authors focuses on significant potential of
discovering new deposits, but they declare the relationship between mineral prediction
and the number of shallow deposits.
4. Authors use the same sentences in the abstract and introduction. Copying the sentences
is not recommended.
5. Use the long version of abbreviation where they occurred first time in the text. For
example, GIS in page 1, GSWA and GA in page 2.
6. Introduction part should be expanded. It is hard to understand the motivation, problem,
current solutions and originality of the study. Authors benefit from some related work
to explain them.
7. At the end of the introduction, I recommend writing paper structure.
8. Italic h in “two points h”.
9. This sentence is not clear to understand. “cox-axis system with h and 𝛾(h) the cox-axis
axis”
10. If authors contribute to the literature by developing new formulas in Equation 1 and
Equation 2, this should be emphasized in the text. Otherwise, authors have to give
references for these formulas.
11. Please shorten some too long sentences to increase understandability. For example,
“There were 171 known ore locations in the study area, and a certain number of negative
samples had to be identified for the machine-learning algorithm to predict
mineralization, so 171 non-ore locations were randomly and evenly selected ac-cording
to the study area, and a sample set with ore was defined as the positive sample, and the
sample set without ore was defined as the negative sample.”
12. Authors cited just 17 references. Four of them were used for just one sentence at the end
of the introduction part. Authors indicate in this sentence that why they used the
methods and analysis. So, even if this sentence does not need to be cited, authors gave
four references. Six out of 17 were used for another sentence about confusion matrix.
13. Authors have 22,900 samples from two datasets, but they used just 342 samples (1%)
for training. There is a technical problem. Authors should explain the reason. On page
3, “three different training sample sets were constructed according to 10%, 40%, and
70% of the total number of samples”. These ratios also conflict with the number of
sample size given in the text.
14. In Table 1, why the numbers of positive and negative samples are equal? How these
samples chosen? How authors avoid bias results from selecting the samples?
15. Confusion matrix is not a methodology. It is a table that is used to define the
performance of a classification algorithm. So, authors confuse with technical terms.
Moreover, this study does not need to be included in near to two-page explanations
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about confusion matrix. It is a well-known matrix.
16. Authors ignore the assumptions of the methods they applied in the study. They directly
apply logistic regression. Therefore, the results can mislead the decision makers.
Moreover, authors say that they applied three ML methods, they just focus on logistic
regression. In one sentence they mention the name of support vector machine and
random forest (on page 9). Similarly, authors calculate Accuracy, Sensitivity,
Specificity, False Positive Rate, False Negative Rate, Kappa Coefficient but just focus
on accuracy and sensitivity.
17. The organization of the paper is not obvious. Following the paper in a rational flow is
difficult. For just an example, authors give details on the prediction degree curve on
page 16 but they explain it on page 7 under logistic regression.
18. Logistic Regression achieves that by squashing the output space into a binary one. So,
it cannot predict a continuous variable. It is not understandable what is dependent and
independent variables. What authors try to predict? It is better showing a part of raw
data set.
19. Authors say, “The prediction accuracy of logistic regression was also gradually
increasing when the samples were 10% and 70% of the total”. This is an already known
fact. No analysis is required for this. However, I want to know that how authors sure
that this positive relationship does not results from overfitting. In a prediction research
overfitting and underfitting are two critical learning terms that we should consider for
reliable results. This point also indicates that authors confuse with technical terms.
20. I do not understand why authors investigate how accuracy and sensitivity change
considering the number of samples. As I understand from the study’s aim, this is not a
goal.
21. How is Figure 3 created? There is no information about it.
22. How can be an accuracy rate larger than 1? (Table 4). If they show percentage values,
how a ML method has a 0.8-percentage-accuracy? Moreover, it is not obvious how
Table 4 was created. For example, authors give logistic regression results in detail but
how they obtained 11.33 value for S1-S3? It is not clear why authors calculated Standard
Deviation of Average Prediction Accuracy. They do not use these results for an
implication.
23. Authors mention about weight-of-evidence method but it is not explained in the
manuscript. Also, it is not clear how they calculated the number of known deposits
predicted by the weight-of-evidence method was 94. Therefore “The prediction ability
of machine-learning algorithm was significantly better than the weight-of-evidence
method.” is an unsupported result.
24. In conclusion, authors should discuss the limitations and future directions of the study.
25. A literature review section has to be added to show the gap in the literature. Literature
review should be done to show the contribution of the study. Authors should aim to
present scientific gaps and they fill one of these gaps by the proposed study. A review
such as “X did method A, Y did method B, and method C was done by Z” does not refer
a contribution. Please create a summary table for the related research.
26. It is not clear that what authors contribute to the literature. They apply well-known ML

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methods and present the results. There is no algorithmic improvement and scientific
development. The results are also not well enough for a scientific publication.