GeoCLA: An Integrated CNN-BiLSTM-Attention Framework for Geochemical Anomaly Detection in the Hatu Region, Xinjiang

Geochemical anomaly detection is a critical stage in mineral exploration, playing a key role in predicting potential mineral targets. Traditional methodologies often struggle to integrate the spatial structure of geochemical data with underlying geological constraints effectively. To address this limitation, we propose GeoCLA, a geochemical anomaly detection framework that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks, and an Attention Mechanism (AM). This integrated spatial-attention architecture captures complex correlations among multiple features to improve anomaly identification. The method constructs spatial sequential samples from geochemical data. The CNNs extract local spatial patterns, the BiLSTM models sequential dependencies, and the AM enhances the representation of critical features. Anomaly scores are computed using the reconstruction error between the model output and the original data. In addition, a fault-distance weighting factor is incorporated to build a comprehensive anomaly evaluation index. The proposed model was applied to the Hatu gold district in Xinjiang, China. Both visual analysis and quantitative evaluation demonstrate effectiveness, achieving a ROC-AUC of 0.86 and a mineral occurrence coverage rate of 97% within moderate-to-high anomaly prospective areas, significantly outperforming baseline methods.