GeoChemAD: Benchmarking Unsupervised Geochemical Anomaly Detection for Mineral Exploration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ding, Yihao, Zhang, Yiran, Gonzalez, Chris, Holden, Eun-Jung, Liu, Wei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Ding, Yihao
Zhang, Yiran
Gonzalez, Chris
Holden, Eun-Jung
Liu, Wei
author_facet Ding, Yihao
Zhang, Yiran
Gonzalez, Chris
Holden, Eun-Jung
Liu, Wei
contents Geochemical anomaly detection plays a critical role in mineral exploration as deviations from regional geochemical baselines may indicate mineralization. Existing studies suffer from two key limitations: (1) single region scenarios which limit model generalizability; (2) proprietary datasets, which makes result reproduction unattainable. In this work, we introduce \textbf{GeoChemAD}, an open-source benchmark dataset compiled from government-led geological surveys, covering multiple regions, sampling sources, and target elements. The dataset comprises eight subsets representing diverse spatial scales and sampling conditions. To establish strong baselines, we reproduce and benchmark a range of unsupervised anomaly detection methods, including statistical models, generative and transformer-based approaches. Furthermore, we propose \textbf{GeoChemFormer}, a transformer-based framework that leverages self-supervised pretraining to learn target-element-aware geochemical representations for spatial samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoChemFormer consistently achieves superior and robust performance across all eight subsets, outperforming existing unsupervised methods in both anomaly detection accuracy and generalization capability. The proposed dataset and framework provide a foundation for reproducible research and future development in this direction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13068
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GeoChemAD: Benchmarking Unsupervised Geochemical Anomaly Detection for Mineral Exploration
Ding, Yihao
Zhang, Yiran
Gonzalez, Chris
Holden, Eun-Jung
Liu, Wei
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Geochemical anomaly detection plays a critical role in mineral exploration as deviations from regional geochemical baselines may indicate mineralization. Existing studies suffer from two key limitations: (1) single region scenarios which limit model generalizability; (2) proprietary datasets, which makes result reproduction unattainable. In this work, we introduce \textbf{GeoChemAD}, an open-source benchmark dataset compiled from government-led geological surveys, covering multiple regions, sampling sources, and target elements. The dataset comprises eight subsets representing diverse spatial scales and sampling conditions. To establish strong baselines, we reproduce and benchmark a range of unsupervised anomaly detection methods, including statistical models, generative and transformer-based approaches. Furthermore, we propose \textbf{GeoChemFormer}, a transformer-based framework that leverages self-supervised pretraining to learn target-element-aware geochemical representations for spatial samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoChemFormer consistently achieves superior and robust performance across all eight subsets, outperforming existing unsupervised methods in both anomaly detection accuracy and generalization capability. The proposed dataset and framework provide a foundation for reproducible research and future development in this direction.
title GeoChemAD: Benchmarking Unsupervised Geochemical Anomaly Detection for Mineral Exploration
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13068