Application of a Modular Feedforward Neural Network for Grade Estimation

This article presents new neural network (NN) architecture to improve its ability for grade estimation. The main aim of this study is to use a specific NN which has a simpler architecture and consequently achieve a better solution. Most of the commonly used NNs have a fully established connection among their nodes, which necessitates a multivariable objective function to be optimized. Therefore, the more the number of variables in the objective function, the more the complexity of the NN. This leads the NN to trap in local minima. In this study, a new NN, in which the connections based on the final performance are eliminated, is used. Toward this aim, several network architectures were tested, and finally a network which yielded the minimum error was selected. This selected network has low complexity and connection among nodes which help the learning algorithm to converge rapidly and more accurately. Furthermore, this network has this ability to deal with the small number of data sets. For testing and evaluating this new method, a case study of an iron deposit was performed. Also, to compare the obtained results, some common techniques for grade estimation, e.g., geostatistics and multilayer perceptron (MLP) were used. According to the obtained results, this new NN architecture shows a better performance for grade estimation.