GEOMAPLEARN 1.0: Detecting geological structures from geological maps with machine learning

Abstract. The increasing availability of large geological datasets together with modern methods of data analysis facilitate a data science approach to geology in which inferences are drawn from geological data using automated methods based on statistics and machine learning. Such methods offer the potential for faster and less subjective interpretations of geological data than are possible from a human interpreter, but translating the understanding of a trained geologist to an algorithm is not straightforward. In this paper, we present automated workflows for detecting geological folds from map data using both unsupervised and supervised machine learning. For the unsupervised case, we use regular expression matching to identify map patterns suggestive of folds along lines crossing the map. We then use the hdbscan clustering algorithm to cluster these possible fold identifications into a smaller number of distinct folds, the number of which is not known a priori. For the supervised learning case, we use synthetic models of folds to train a convolutional neural network to identify folds using map and topographic data. We test both methods on synthetic and real datasets.