ABSTRACT
As human population grows, so does the pressure to improve the efficiency on the use of mineral resources which are finite, nonrenewable and fundamental to human existence and its development. Lately there has been a growth in the application of geometallurgy models, an instrument that allows the connection between ore characteristics and mineral processing in a predictive model that is essential for mine planning. Integrated control of the quality of the ore from its mining to its final product can be accomplished by building a geological-typological model, establishing the spatial relationships at the deposits to the different ore-type categories. This article presents an ore-type model built using clustering and indicator kriging to identify and map the domains. Additionally, the metallurgical recovery within each domain is predicted using a multivariate linear regression model. The results were compared against real recovery proving the accuracy and precision of the predictions derived from the model. The methodology is illustrated at a major phosphate deposit
