Spatial modeling for mineral prospectivity using BWM and COPRAS as a new HMCDM method

Since outcropping deposits in well-explored terrains are increasingly extracted, it highlights the need for incessant exploration in a region of low exploration maturity or newly discovered search areas. Such immature exploration areas can benefit considerably from mineral prospectivity mapping (MPM) to outline promising target domains where ensuing exploration activities could be centered on. In this regard, the present study endeavors to put forward an innovative hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (HMCDM) method called BWM-COPRAS for efficacious targeting of Cu prospective zones in the Abhar area, NW Iran. BWM-COPRAS incorporates two distinct approaches in which the best-worst method (BWM) was applied to weight evidential maps and their corresponding classes while complex proportional assessment (COPRAS) was used to rank the varieties of alternatives in terms of significance. BWM-COPRAS coupled with predication-area (P–A) plot and the index of normalized density ( Nd ) provides an authoritative configuration for generating predictions with impressive reliability. Aside from BWM-COPRAS, the fusion of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) was employed as another MPM method merely to perceive how well the BWM-COPRAS approach works in predicting favorable zones. In light of this, the P–A plot was applied to evaluate the performance of both prospectivity models upon which the BWM-COPRAS prospectivity model leads to better predictions owing to a higher prediction rate and Nd value. Consequently, the BWM-COPRAS model can be efficiently used as a target map for follow-up detailed exploration of deposits of type sought within Abhar area or anywhere else.