Title: Treatment of gold outliers from belt samples

Hi Kevin,

 

In the case of block estimation, I do not tend to remove or cut-back outliers to a known value – these high grade samples are after all a unique feature of the deposit, they must mean something right? I do, however, tend to limit their influence on blocks being estimated. Typically, I do this by ignoring any sample above a threshold lying outside a nominated search ellipsoid.

 

I am sure there are many other ways of treating these samples, one is the 95% limit you mention, so it will be interesting to see the various responses.

 

Regards,

Colin

 


From: Kevin Lowe (Office Park) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 12 May 2005 11:41
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ai-geostats] Treatment of gold outliers from belt samples

 

Hi,
How should one treat obvious gold grade outliers from samples collected from a belt?

The sampling is carried out by an automatic belt sampler prior to the ore being milled. The samples are collected and stored in a bin until there is approximately 1 ton of sample. The bin is then sent off to a lab which crushes and splits the 1 ton bin sample to produce 8 separate samples which are then assayed. Assuming there are no issues with the lab procedures, how should one treat a very high value?

For example purposes, say the 8 samples returned grades (g/t) of 2.8, 4.6, 5.2, 4.5, 35.6, 3.6, 4.2, 4.7. The arithmetic mean for the eight is 8.15g/t but if the one high grade is removed the arithmetic mean is 4.23g/t. Should I simply exclude the high value or should I cut the value of the sample to some arbitrary value (say the upper 95% confidence limit)? Although individual chip samples collected from the orebody, for the purposes of evaluation, are highly skewed, the samples from the bin approximate a normal distribution (excluding the high value).

I look forward to any comments or perhaps direction to papers or web sites on this topic.

Many Thanks

Kevin Lowe

 


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