Orange-Volcanoes: A new open and collaborative platform to perform data-driven investigations and machine learning analyses in petrology and volcanology

Orange-Volcanoes is an extension of the open-source Orange data mining platform specifically tailored for geochemical, petrological, and volcanological investigations. Orange-Volcanoes enhances the original platform by incorporating specialized tools to enable interactive data-driven investigations in geochemistry, such as performing Compositional Data Analysis (CoDA). Applying CoDA transformations enables the use of many standard and multivariate statistical methods like principal component analysis, discriminant analysis, and hierarchical clustering on compositional data. In this way, Orange-Volcanoes allows for the application of a wide range of data mining and statistical methods implemented in Orange using geochemical data. Moreover, Orange allows the use of advanced methods in the field of explainable artificial intelligence, such as feature importance and Shapley additive explanations. Also, within Orange-Volcanoes, we demonstrate the flexibility of the Orange platform by developing visual tools that allow for conducting mineral-liquid equilibrium tests and calculating thermo-barometric estimates. The Orange-Volcanoes supports collaborative efforts and reproducibility by offering a visual programming interface that requires no coding experience, making it accessible to a wide range of users, including scientists, educators, and students. We provide a series of case studies, including interactive petrological data exploration and clustering in tephra studies to highlight Orange-Volcanoes’ potential and versatility in volcanological applications. Orange-Volcanoes can be downloaded using pip, and its documentation is available at https://orange3-volcanoes.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.