Structural and non-structural statistical methods: implications for delineating geochemical anomalies

ABSTRACT Geochemical sampling media, be they rock chip, soil or stream sediment samples, routinely collected in mineral exploration, are key to detecting mineralisation-related geochemical dispersion patterns. Notwithstanding the diversity of methods applied to geochemical anomaly detection, they can be broadly divided into two major groups, namely structural and non-structural techniques. The former group covers those methods in which threshold values are assigned based on sample location while the sample locations are not required in the application of the non-structural techniques. In this study, rock chip samples from the Shadan porphyry copper–gold deposit are used to address the question as to how structural and non-structural methods can separate geochemical populations for the purpose of a deposit-scale study. It was revealed that the two structural techniques used in this study, concentration-area (C-A) fractal and U-spatial statistic methods, outperformed the non-structural techniques employed in this study.