“…In recent years, there have been growing literatures on the application of weights-of-evidence model for mineral exploration (Carranza, 2004;Daneshfar et al, 2006), and the model has also been applied in other fields such as animal habitats (Romero and Luque, 2006), geologic hazards (Zahiri et al, 2006;Neuhäuser and Terhorst, 2007;Song et al, 2008), groundwater resources (Cheng, 2004;Corsini et al, 2009) and hydrology pollution (Masetti et al, 2007). In the last few years, some other spatial statistical models also have been used in mineral resources assessment, such as logistic regression model (Agterberg et al, 1993;Sahoo and Pandala, 1999;Carranza and Hale, 2001), fuzzy logic model (Luo and Dimitrakopoulos, 2003), artificial neural networks model (Koike et al, 2002;Rigol-Sanchez et al, 2003;Nykänen, 2008). Compared with other models, the weights-of-evidence model has some advantages in assessing mineral resources: 1) the weights are relatively easy to be interpreted, they can be confirmed independently, and the favorable targets can be identified easily from the posterior probability or the sum of weights for visual analysis; 2) using proximity analysis to obtain optimal cut-offs, the method provides better estimates for contrast, studentised contrast and buffer size; and 3) it also can be used to capture suitable fuzzy membership (Cheng and Agterberg, 1998;Porwal et al, 2003).…”