Using adjacency matrix to explore remarkable associations in big and small mineral data

Abstract

Data exploration, usually the first step in data analysis, is a useful method to tackle challenges caused by big geoscience data. It conducts quick analysis of data, investigates the patterns, and generates/refines research questions to guide advanced statistics and machine learning algorithms. The background of this work is the open mineral data provided by several sources, and the focus is different types of associations in mineral properties and occurrences. Researchers in mineralogy have been applying different techniques for exploring such associations. Although the explored associations can lead to new scientific insights that contribute to crystallography, mineralogy, and geochemistry, the exploration process is often daunting due to the wide range and complexity of factors involved. In this study, our purpose is implementing a visualization tool based on the adjacency matrix for a variety of datasets and testing its utility for quick exploration of association patterns in mineral data. Algorithms, software packages, and use cases have been developed to process a variety of mineral data. The results demonstrate the efficiency of adjacency matrix in real-world usage. All the developed works of this study are open source and open access.