ABSTRACT
Banded iron formation hosted iron ore deposits are typically stratigraphically modelled using exploration drilling. This drilling has a large horizontal spacing, resulting in a coarse model resolution. Production blast holes are drilled at a higher horizontal resolution, but rarely include detailed information. Measure While Drilling (MWD) data is available, however it only provides information about the relative hardness or strength. There is often a large overlap in the MWD data for adjacent rock units, making manual classification difficult. A Gaussian Processes model was used to automatically label MWD points from two adjacent geological units. For a shale to ore contact, the trained GP had an accuracy of 79%. When distinguishing between two ore units, the GP had an accuracy of ~96% for the library and ~83% for the cross-validation data. Therefore this method can provide additional detail about the location of the contact between geological units for modelling.
