Local phase-constrained convolutional autoencoder network for identifying multivariate geochemical anomalies

Autoencoder is a powerful tool for identifying multivariate geochemical anomalies. However, existing autoencoder-based geochemical anomaly detection methods primarily rely on a global reconstruction error (e.g., mean square error) to define the lower limit of geochemical anomalies, neglecting the common, local structure information of geochemical data. This limitation inevitably results in the decreased accuracy of geochemical anomaly identification. This study proposed a local Phase-Constrained Convolutional AutoEncoder network (PC-CAE) for the identification of multivariate geochemical anomalies. Initially, we employed a local Fourier transform to extract phase information from both the original and the reconstructed data. Subsequently, a convolutional autoencoder network was utilized to learn the latent representation of geochemical background, using the local phase difference between the original and reconstructed data to preserve the local data structure related to geology setting. Additionally, an adaptive weighting strategy was employed to mitigate the overfitting issue. The training samples with high reconstruction errors were finally identified as anomalies. We tested the validity of PC-CAE using the stream sediment geochemical dataset collected in the Jiaodong gold province, Eastern China. The results demonstrated that PC-CAE outperforms existing convolutional autoencoder network and spectrum–area multifractal model in identifying multivariate geochemical anomalies associated with Au mineralization.