Fitting mixtures of Kent distributions to aid in joint set identification

When examining a rock mass, joint sets and their orientations can play a si gnificant role with regard to how the rock mass will behave. To identify jo int sets present in the rock mass, the orientation of individual fracture p laner can be measured on exposed rock faces and the resulting data can be e xamined for heterogeneity. In this article, the expectation-maximization al gorithm is used to lit mixtures of Kent component distributions to the frac ture data to aid in the identification of joint sets. An additional uniform component is also included in the model to accommodate the noise present i n the data.