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Modelling geometallurgical response variables using Projection Pursuit

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Conference Paper · October 2015

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4509.3844

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Modelling geometallurgical response variables using
Projection Pursuit regression
Exequiel Sepulveda1, 2 (*), Peter Dowd1 and Chaoshui Xu1
1University of Adelaide, Australia and 2University of Talca, Chile

ABSTRACT
Geometallurgy is an inter-disciplinary approach to improving decision-making and optimising
production in the mining industry by integrating geological and metallurgical data and knowledge.
Improvements come from a better understanding of the resources and their metallurgical
performance and by optimising over the complete mining value chain. The primary-response rock
property framework is an approach to geometallurgy in which primary properties such as grades,
lithology, alteration and mineralogy are proxies of important metallurgical responses; for example,
recovery, comminution and energy use. Using this framework, primary variables are used to
predict key response variables. Primary rock properties, typically geological, geotechnical and
structural, are relatively abundant compared with metallurgical response properties, making the
integration of the latter more difficult. Moreover, the relationship between geometallurgical input
variables and their processing responses is usually complex and the response variables are often
non-additive which complicates the prediction process.
Consequently, in many cases, traditional multi-linear regression models (MLR) are not good
predictors and non-linear models may be a better alternative. Projection Pursuit is a powerful
exploratory statistics technique, in which promising directions are found and data are projected on
to these directions to reveal underlying relationships. In particular, Projection Pursuit Regression
(PPR) finds several directions in which the variance explained by the projected data is maximised,
which enables more accurate predictions to be made. In this paper we present a case study in which
six geometallurgical response variables are modelled by PPR of primary properties. The results
from the proposed PPR models show a significant improvement over those from MLR models. In
addition, as the quantification of uncertainty is a key aspect of risk management, the models were
bootstrapped to generate a distribution of feasible scenarios. Our results show that PPR is a robust
technique for modelling geometallurgical response variables and their uncertainty.

Keywords: Geometallurgical modelling, Projection Pursuit, Risk Management

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INTRODUCTION
The integration of geological and metallurgical data and knowledge is not new; however, in recent
years, this integration has developed into an emerging discipline termed geometallurgy. There are
many definitions of geometallurgy, but all of them agree on the importance of an integrated
approach to mine optimisation and claim a substantial improvement in mine planning (Dunham &
Vann, 2007; Walters, 2008; Coward et al., 2009, 2013; Coward & Dowd, 2015). The incorporation of
metallurgical response variables into the resource model allows not only a more realistic
optimisation of economic objectives, but also of processing performance, resulting in more robust
project evaluation under uncertainty. The most widely used tests for determining comminution
performance are the Bond Mill Work index (BWi), Rod Mill Work index (RWi), Semi-autonomous
grinding (SAG) Performance index (SPI), resistance to abrasion and breakage index (A*b) and the
Drop Weight index (DWi). The most common processing recovery tests are for flotation and
leaching performance. A clearer understanding of the physical and chemical principles on which
these performance indices are based has contributed to the growing use and acceptance of the
concept of geometallurgy. Basic geology and processing knowledge are now enriched with
mineralogy, lithology, textural characteristics and particle liberation profiles that can explain more
precisely the comminution and processing performances, but there remain significant impediments
to incorporating these variables and the process responses in a manner that can be used in practice.
Unfortunately, due to the lack of appropriate geometallurgical data collection and analysis, or their
absence, there are usually insufficient test-work results for reliable metallurgical modelling. The
significant difference between the large numbers of samples recorded in geological databases
(logging, assaying and geotechnical data) and the relatively few metallurgical test-work samples
impedes the incorporation of metallurgical responses into the resource model using geostatistical
methods (Hunt et al., 2013). Additional issues arise from the non-additivity of many metallurgical
response variables (Dunham & Vann, 2007), which may require indirect methods of up-scaling
responses from the laboratory (sample) scale to production scales. The primary-response
framework (Coward et al., 2009, 2013; Coward & Dowd, 2015) allows primary rock properties
(intrinsic rock attributes directly measured from the rock) to be used to predict response properties,
which are a result of a process or the application of energy, such as recovery and comminution
performance. Because most primary rock properties are abundant in mining operations, the goal is
to find some functions that can be used to predict response properties from primary properties and
to incorporate them into the resource model.
Under the primary-response framework, there are two key aspects to consider. The first aspect is
the selection of a transfer function that has good prediction performance. The most commonly used
statistical model for predicting a dependent variable using a set of inputs is regression. Regression
is based on the assumption of a functional relationship between a dependent variable and one or
more independent input variables. There are several regression models and methods but the most
commonly used is multi-linear regression (MLR). However, as MLR requires strong linear
relationships, its predictability is poor when the relationships among dependent and independent
inputs are mostly non-linear.
Because we often observe strong non-linear relationships among geometallurgical variables, MLR is
unlikely to be the best option for predicting response variables and other regression models should
be considered. In fact, there are several non-linear regression techniques that exhibit good
performance in the case of complex relationships, such as machine learning methods, polynomial
regression, and projection pursuit methods.

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The second key aspect to consider is to find most important variables in terms of predictability
given a set of available primary variables. This issue is related to the difficulty of handling high
dimensional data in geometallurgy. Higher dimensions require much more data and are much
more difficult to model as when the dimensionality is high, data become sparser and therefore
finding the best relationship becomes more difficult. In this case, reducing dimensionality could
lead to better and simpler models.
Geometallurgical characterization using regression and dimensionality reduction is an active
common approach implemented by many recent researchers. Keeney & Walters (2011) used
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to define nine geometallurgical classes based on 500 samples
with mineralogy data from assays and two comminution indices: BWi and A*b. PCA analysis was
used to map multi-dimensional information into a two-dimensional scatter plot and the
relationships were then manually built in different classes according to their associations. This
classification procedure is necessary because lithology and rock type domains are not necessarily
sufficient for representing geometallurgical domains. They successfully modelled two response
variables for each geometallurgical domain using a customised non-linear model with good
coefficients of determination (R2).
Boisvert et al. (2013) merged variables to reduce dimensionality. They used grades, mineralogy and
mineral association data to predict six plant performance variables. In their model, from a total of
204 input variables, four different subsets were created in several amalgamation steps. Finally,
three different models, each containing different subsets of merged variables, were developed and
multi-linear regressions were then applied. Reasonable to good correlations between true and
estimated values were achieved, varying from 0.533 to 0.9. These MLR models were used to include
plant performance indices in a resource model. Similarly, Hunt et al. (2013) used grades,
mineralogy, lithology, and alteration data to predict three comminution indices: SPI, BWi and A*b.
They applied a feature selection method to select the best predictive variables and used multi-linear
regression models. They reported average relative errors in the range of 6-12%.
Recent research by Hunt et al. (2014) uses both qualitative and quantitative primary rock properties
(grades, lithology, sulphide class and gangue class). They define archetypes or geometallurgical
domains and establish several linear regression models for each different archetype for Copper
recovery. Using 162 samples, they obtain a good model performance with R2 between 0.69 and 0.85.
There is no clear or unique set of rules for choosing a particular modelling technique, as the choice
is case dependent. In geometallurgical characterisation, there is often no clear linear relationship
and a non-linear method may work better than MLR. In the case study presented here, MLR does
not perform well. We show that PPR is a good alternative for geometallurgical modelling in this
case. Following the PPR modelling, the proposed models are bootstrapped to assess their
uncertainty for the purpose of risk management.

METHOD

Regression
Regression is a statistical technique in which a dependent variable is modelled as the combination
of a function of independent variables and an independent error term (Equation 1).
𝒚 = 𝒇(𝑿) + 𝒆 (1)

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where y is the dependent variable, X represents multidimensional input variables and e is the
independent error term.
The simplest and most widely used regression technique is the multi-linear regression model
defined in Equation (2). Here, the regression function is a linear combination of independent
variables. The regression coefficients are commonly obtained by least-squared minimisation of the
residual in the dependent variable y.
𝒚 = 𝒃𝟎 + ∑𝒏𝒊=𝟏 𝒃𝒊 𝒙𝒊 + 𝒆 (2)
where b0 is the intercept, n is the number of input variables and bi is the regression coefficient for
the i-th input variable.
Although MLR is simple and easy to interpret, it requires strong linear correlations between the
dependent and the independent variables. When these correlations are diverse and non-linear,
MLR performs poorly as will be shown later. In such a case, non-linear regression models should
be used instead.

Projection Pursuit regression

Projection Pursuit Regression is a non-parametric method for multivariate regression based on the
principles of Projection Pursuit (PP), an exploratory technique formalised by Friedman & Tukey
(1974). The objective of PP is to find the best direction in which the projection of the multi-
dimensional data onto that direction can reveal some interesting property. Since any interesting
property is subjective and depends on the problem to be solved, a specific projection index is
defined for each specific case and hence different indices are obtained for different projections. For
example, projection indices have been defined for exploratory analysis (Friedman & Tukey, 1974),
density estimation (Friedman et al., 1984), regression (Friedman & Stuetzle, 1981) and de-
correlating variables (Barnett et al., 2013). Once a projection index has been defined, the goal of PP
is to find the direction in which this projection index is maximized.
Specifically, in the case of regression, the projection index is defined as the explained variance of
the dependent variable based on a smoothed model created by the projection on that direction. The
smoothing procedure is applied to ensure that input values near to each other in the multi-
dimensional space, will generate near interpolations. An additional advantage of PPR is that the
method can be applied iteratively to the residuals. Doing so, several directions are found and the
final model is formed by a combination of smoothed models in each direction. The formulation of
PPR is as follows:
𝒚 = ∑𝒎
𝒌=𝟏 𝒔𝐤 (𝜶𝒌 𝑿) (3)
where m is the number of directions used, 𝛼𝑘 is the direction for the k-th projection and 𝑠𝑘 is its
corresponding smoother.

Bootstrapping
As the goal of the regression model is to find a good estimator of its parameters, a valid question
arises: how accurate are these parameters? One way to assess the quality of the parameters of a
model is to apply a cross-validation procedure. The most commonly used cross-validation methods
include simple split, leave p-out, jack-knife and k-fold, but all of these are biased to some extent
(Arlot & Celisse, 2010). A robust cross-validation technique is the bootstrap method (Efron, 1979).
This method is based on the principle of resampling to quantify the degree of variation in an

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estimator as the sample changes. In this paper, we are interested in applying bootstrapping to
assess both the quality of PPR and the variability of predictions. The procedure is as follows: for a
set of observations of size N, randomly select N samples with replacement, i.e., each sample has
equal probability of being chosen in every sampling, i.e., some values are chosen once, some are
chosen more than once and others are not chosen at all. Then, for this re-sampled set, perform PPR
and evaluate its performance. This procedure is repeated many times until the parameters’ statistics
stabilize. As a result, a complete distribution of performance indices and possible responses allows
the uncertainty of the model to be assessed. More details about bootstrapping techniques can be
found in Efron & Tibshirani (1986).
As we are interested in evaluating the model performance and the variability of predictions,
bootstrapping can be applied to any model to quantify uncertainty for risk management.

APPLICATION: GEOMETALLURGICAL CHARACTERIZATION

Case Study
The geometallurgical characterisation is applied to a poly-metallic deposit. There are six
geometallurgical response variables to be modelled; two are the recovery rate of two metals in a
rougher flotation circuit, and the other variables are four comminution indices. Table 1 shows the
basic statistics for the six response variables. The main difficulties in this case study are the small
number of samples for the four comminution variables and the high variance of these variables.
As all test-work results are recorded against the drill holes from which the samples were taken it is
easy to link the geometallurgical response variables to the geological, assay and geotechnical
databases. In this case study, grades, lithology, alteration, mineralisation style and structural
information are available as input variables.
Table 1 Basic statistics of six geometallurgical response variables

Variable # Samples Minimum Mean Maximum Variance

Resistance to Abrasion Breakage (A*b) 64 24.4 31.45 51.20 19.28
Drop Weight index (DWi) 58 5.5 8.90 10.77 1.10
Bond Ball Mill Wok index (BWi) 36 18.1 20.14 23.60 1.81
Bond Rod Mill Wok index (RWi) 33 22.9 28.45 34.00 10.36
Gold Rougher Recovery (Au Rec) 247 42.9 80.36 94.70 77.40
Copper Rougher Recovery (Cu Rec) 247 55.9 88.93 98.50 69.19

Using the primary-response framework, a model is to be found which can be used to estimate the
six response variables using the available primary variables. This process is not difficult if the
relationships are simple. However, in this case study, there are two problems. The first issue is the
high dimensionality of the input space and the second is the complexity of the relationships among
primary and response variables. The first problem is addressed by the application of a feature
selection method and the second by Projection Pursuit regression, with details given below.

Feature selection
Feature selection techniques seek to reduce the number of input variables by identifying and
discarding variables that do not contribute significantly to the performance of a regression model.

5
In our study, discriminant analysis and the gamma test were used to select a common subset of
primary variables to be used in PPR on the six response variables.
Table 2 shows, as a result of this preliminary selection process, the 13 selected variables and their
correlations with the output variables. In general, there are no strong correlations among primary
and response variables. For example, only Fe and BWi and QCK mineralization and Cu recovery
have absolute correlations greater than 0.5. Among the categorical variables, only QCK
mineralization shows a consistent correlation with the response variables. The correlations between
grade variables and the response variables range from nothing to around 0.56.
Table 2 Correlations between primary and response variables

Variables Ab BWi DWi RWi Au Rec Cu Rec

Grades Au 0.068 -0.254 -0.163 -0.085 0.263 -0.001
Cu 0.056 -0.105 -0.092 -0.120 0.201 0.330
S -0.062 0.160 0.023 -0.019 -0.016 0.298
Fe -0.100 0.559 0.177 0.395 -0.197 -0.357
Mo 0.173 -0.178 -0.219 -0.195 0.130 0.303
Lithology VC -0.017 0.129 0.039 -0.311 0.057 -0.117
M -0.064 -0.148 0.031 0.089 -0.050 -0.121
BX 0.095 -0.160 -0.191 -0.149 0.062 -0.008
Alteration S 0.073 -0.060 -0.060 -0.122 -0.003 0.014
Ch 0.030 0.183 0.006 0.141 -0.192 -0.349
Bt -0.095 0.223 0.092 0.388 0.005 -0.111
Mineralization QCK -0.263 0.180 0.271 0.572 -0.177 -0.470
QZC -0.029 0.044 0.032 0.070 -0.007 0.146

To quantify the contribution of different categories of data, two models were defined. Table 3
summarises the definition of models A and B. Model A includes all 13 variables and model B
includes only five grade variables.
Table 3 Model A includes all input variables and model B includes only five grade variables

Model Grades Lithology Alteration Mineralisation Style

A (5) Gold, Copper, Sulphur, Iron (3) VC, M and (3) S, Ch and (2) QZC and QCK
and Molybdenum BX Bt
B (5) Gold, Copper, Sulphur, Iron None None None
and Molybdenum

Model B has been strategically selected to assess the performance of a model with a reduced
number of inputs. This is important because to propagate the response variables into the resource
model, the geostatistical estimation or simulation for model B becomes simpler. Correlated
variables require modelling of auto- and cross-variograms in estimation or simulation and the
complexity of this procedure increases as the number of input variables increases. For example,
geostatistical modelling of n correlated variables would require modelling n(n+1)/2 variograms and
cross-variograms, e.g., for ten variables, 55 variograms and cross-variograms would have to be
modelled. An additional complexity may be present when some variables are categorical and
spatially correlated with the continuous variables. Joint geostatistical modelling of a large number
of continuous and categorical variables is still very challenging, although there are approaches to

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do so with one categorical variable (Xu & Dowd, 2009; Maleki & Emery, 2014). If many categorical
variables are involved, the modelling may involve some de-correlation to transform the input
variables into a set of uncorrelated variables in order to simplify the geostatistical modelling
process (Deutsch, 2013). However, these de-correlating methods cannot ensure full spatial de-
correlation.
A priori, we would expect model A to perform better than model B because more input variables
are used, but the improvement may not be sufficient to justify a more complicated geostatistical
model.
Table 4 Summary of correlation coefficients of MLR models

Variables Model A Model B

Simple Bootstrapped Simple Bootstrapped
A*b 0.46 0.27 0.21 0.15
DWi 0.53 0.29 0.30 0.24
BWi 0.72 0.40 0.60 0.49
RWi 0.80 0.49 0.46 0.34
Au Rec 0.49 0.45 0.36 0.34
Cu Rec 0.69 0.67 0.55 0.54

In order to compare the predictive performance of PPR, multi-linear regression models were
generated and bootstrapped. Table 4 summarizes the correlation coefficient (R) for model A and B
with and without the bootstrapping procedure (simple and bootstrapped respectively). The mean R
is presented for the bootstrapped version. As expected, bootstrapped models show poorer
performance. Comminution variables show a significant decrease while the two recovery variables
show little difference. This is expected because the models become more stable with more samples.
Only the model for copper recovery (Cu Rec variable) has a moderate R greater than 0.5. On the
basis of the bootstrapped models for the A*b, RWi, Au Rec and Cu Rec variables, model A performs
substantially better than model B; for DWi, there is little difference in both models, and for BWi,
model B shows a small improvement. Nevertheless, all the MLR models have low correlations.

Projection Pursuit
The number of projections is one of the most important parameters of PPR. In general, the
predictability increases as the number of projections increases but too many projections can result
in over-fitting. The scatterplots in Figure 1 show the improvement of the correlation between
predicted and true values of the Au recovery variable as the number of projections increases from
one to ten. The diagonal blue line indicates perfect correlation and the red line shows the PPR
correlation.
The simplest way to assess the appropriate number of projections is to construct a chart of the
performance index versus the number of projections. We expect the improvement in the
performance index to decrease as the number of projections increases and eventually to become
insignificant, as demonstrated in Figure 1. In our case, the correlation coefficient between the true
and predicted values is used as the performance index, even though other indices can be also used
as performance indices, such as the coefficient of determination, mean absolute error, and root
mean squared error.

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 Figure 1 Scatterplots of true vs predicted values of gold recovery using from one to ten projections

Figure 2 shows the correlations from one to ten projections for both models. Using seven
projections, the six response regressions all reach a correlation coefficient of at least 0.8. Using ten
projections, a correlation close to 1.0 is reached for model A. For model B, using eight projections
the correlation is very good for all geometallurgical response variables. For comminution indices,
both models A and B show similar performance with four or more projections. For metal recovery
rates, a difference is observed, but it is not significant when five or more projections are used. These
results suggest that the simplest model, model B, is a good alternative to model A in terms of
performance but with the advantage of only using five input variables which will simplify
significantly the geostatistical multivariate modelling.

Figure 2 Correlation between true and predicted values of model A and B for different numbers of projections

To assess the accuracy and final predictability, both models were bootstrapped. A total of 500
resamples with replacement were generated in order to assess the variability and uncertainty
associated with each model. Table 5 shows the distribution of correlations between true and
predicted values for all response variables in both models. The mean correlation is lower than the

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non-bootstrapped models in all response variables, especially for comminution indices. This is
expected because of the small sample size and high variance as for a small dataset, removing only
one sample may change significantly the data distribution. Comparing the performance of both
models based on the bootstrapped results, there is no significant improvement in model A even
though it includes more input variables. Indeed, the mean correlation of model A is higher than
that of model B for only three response variables. The correlations of A*b, Au Rec and Cu Rec
response variables decrease systematically from model A to B; but for DWi, BWi and RWi, model B
performs slightly better. These figures suggest that models A and B show similar performances and
there is no evidence that one performs better than the other.
Table 5 Summary of distribution of correlations of models A and B with PPR

Variable Min. 25% 50% Mean 75% Max.

Model A:
A*b 0.25 0.52 0.61 0.61 0.69 0.90
DWi 0.30 0.56 0.64 0.63 0.70 0.88
BWi 0.34 0.64 0.70 0.70 0.77 0.93
RWi 0.24 0.67 0.74 0.72 0.80 0.95
Au Rec 0.53 0.66 0.69 0.69 0.72 0.80
Cu Rec 0.71 0.79 0.81 0.81 0.83 0.89
Model B:
A*b 0.12 0.49 0.60 0.59 0.70 0.86
DWi 0.30 0.57 0.65 0.64 0.72 0.87
BWi 0.42 0.70 0.76 0.75 0.82 0.95
RWi 0.26 0.66 0.74 0.72 0.81 0.93
Au Rec 0.51 0.65 0.68 0.68 0.71 0.79
Cu Rec 0.65 0.73 0.75 0.75 0.78 0.85

Comparing correlation values of MRL and PPR regressions, we can state that PPR performs much
better than MLR for all six response variables. Indeed, the mean correlation of PPR is more than
twice the mean correlation of MLR in two and three variables for model A and B respectively. The
most significant improvement is in model B for the variable A*b; the PPR model has a mean R value
of 0.59 compared to 0.15 for the MLR model.

CONCLUSIONS
Projection Pursuit regression was successfully used to establish relationships between primary and
response variables. In this case study, four comminution indices and two recovery rates are
predicted using two sets of primary variables (models A and B). Model A, which includes 13
variables (a combination of continuous and categorical variables), shows a similar performance to
model B, which has only five continuous variables. As the difference is not significant, model B is a
good option for the final model as it is simpler and it requires much less effort in geostatistical
modelling. To quantify the uncertainty of the regression models the bootstrapping technique was
applied to generate the complete distribution of possible predictions. Finally, in the case of resource
models, geostatistical simulation can be used to assess geological uncertainty and bootstrapped
geometallurgical models provide a means of incorporating metallurgical uncertainty. Both
uncertainties should be included in any mine planning optimisation process providing a means of
more accurate risk management for decision-makers.

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