Seyed Hassan Tabatabaei Journal Iranian Journal of Mining Engineering Volume 10 Issue 28 Pages 53-65 Publisher http://ir-sme. ir/ Description Dashkasan exploration area contains Sari Gunay and Agh Dagh deposits. The Sari Gunay epithermal gold deposit, with 120 Mt reserve with a mean grade of 2 g/t, is the most important Iranian gold deposit in the world-class. The locus of the gold mineralization has been modelled by geochemical soil data through two classification methods including the discrimination analysis (LDA and QDA) and support vector machine (c-SVM and nu-SVM). The productivity index, sum of the multiplication of block grade by its height, is defined for each surface cell by 25×25 meters. This dependent variable has been classified to background, medium and high productivity indices. Geochemical data overlapping with these cells are used to calculate the classifying functions. 70% of data are used as train and the rest as the test data. The results show that the nu-SVM with 57.9%, LDA with 80% and nu-SVM, c-SVM and LDA with 57.9 …