Author Identifier

Ute Mueller

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8670-2120

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Mathematical Geosciences

Publisher

Springer

School

School of Science

RAS ID

32018

Funders

CSIRO's Deep Earth Imaging Future Science Platform

Comments

Talebi, H., Peeters, L. J. M., Mueller, U., Tolosana-Delgado, R., & van den Boogaart, K. G. (2020). Towards geostatistical learning for the geosciences: A case study in improving the spatial awareness of spectral clustering. Mathematical Geosciences, 52(8), 1035-1048. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11004-020-09867-0

Abstract

The particularities of geosystems and geoscience data must be understood before any development or implementation of statistical learning algorithms. Without such knowledge, the predictions and inferences may not be accurate and physically consistent. Accuracy, transparency and interpretability, credibility, and physical realism are minimum criteria for statistical learning algorithms when applied to the geosciences. This study briefly reviews several characteristics of geoscience data and challenges for novel statistical learning algorithms. A novel spatial spectral clustering approach is introduced to illustrate how statistical learners can be adapted for modelling geoscience data. The spatial awareness and physical realism of the spectral clustering are improved by utilising a dissimilarity matrix based on nonparametric higher-order spatial statistics. The proposed model-free technique can identify meaningful spatial clusters (i.e. meaningful geographical subregions) from multivariate spatial data at different scales without the need to define a model of co-dependence. Several mixed (e.g. continuous and categorical) variables can be used as inputs to the proposed clustering technique. The proposed technique is illustrated using synthetic and real mining datasets. The results of the case studies confirm the usefulness of the proposed method for modelling spatial data.

DOI

10.1007/s11004-020-09867-0

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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