Evaluation of interpolation accuracy of neural kriging with application to temperature-distribution analysis

An interpolation method based on a multilayer neural network (MNN), has been examined and tested for the data of irregular sample locations. The main advantage of MNN is in that it can deal with geoscience data with nonlinear behavior and extract characteristics from complex and noisy images. The training of MNN is used to modify connection weights between nodes located in different layers by a simulated annealing algorithm (one of the optimization algorithms of the network). In this process, three types of errors are considered: differences in values, semivariograms, and gradients between sample data and outputs from the trained network. The training is continued until the summation of these errors converges to an acceptably small value. Because the MNN trained by this learning criterion can estimate a value at an arbitrary location, this method is a form of kriging and termed Neural Kriging (NK). In order to evaluate the effectiveness of NK, a problem on restoration ability of a defined reference surface from randomly chosen discrete data was prepared. Two types of surfaces, whose semivariograms are expressed by isotropic spherical and geometric anisotropic gaussian models, were examined in this problem. Though the interpolation accuracy depended on the arrangement pattern of the sample locations for the same number of data, the interpolation errors of NK were shown to be smaller than both those of ordinary MNN and ordinal kriging. NK can also produce a contour map in consideration of gradient constraints. Furthermore, NK was applied to distribution analysis of subsurface temperatures using geothermal investigation loggings of the Hohi area in southwest Japan. In spite of the restricted quantity of sample data, the interpolation results revealed high temperature zones and convection patterns of hydrothermal fluids. NK is regarded as an interpolation method with high accuracy that can be used for regionalized variables with any structure of spatial correlation.