Formation Lithology Classification: Insights into Machine Learning Methods

Abstract

Abstract With the recent tremendous development in algorithms, computations power and availability of the enormous amount of data, the implementation of machine learning approach has spurred the interest in oil and gas industry and brings the data science and analytics into the forefront of our future energy. The idea of using automated algorithms to determine the rock facies is not new. However, the recent advancement in machine learning methods encourages to further research and revisit the supervised classification tasks, discuss the methodological limits and further improve machine learning approach and classification algorithms in rock facies classification from well-logging measurements. This paper demonstrates training different machine learning algorithms to classify and predict the geological facies using well logs data. Previous and recent research was done using supervised learning to predict the geological facies. This paper compares the results from the supervised learning algorithms, unsupervised learning algorithms as well as a neural network machine learning algorithm. We further propose an integrated approach to dataset processing and feature selection. The well logs data used in this paper are for wells in the Anadarko Basin, Kansas. The dataset is divided into training, testing and evaluating wells used for testing the model. The objective is to evaluate the algorithms and limitations of each algorithm. We speculate that a simple supervised learning algorithm can yield score higher than neural network algorithm depending on the model parameter selected. Analysis for the parameter selection was done for all the models, and the optimum parameter was used for the corresponding classifier. Our proposed neural network algorithm results score slightly higher than the supervised learning classifiers when evaluated with the cross-validation test data. It is concluded that it is important to calculate the accuracy within the adjacent layers as there are no definite boundaries between the layers. Our results indicate that calculating the accuracy of prediction with taking account the adjacent layers, yield higher accuracy than calculating accuracy within each point. The proposed feed-forward neural network classifier trains using backpropagation (gradient descent) provides accuracy within adjacent layers of 88%. Our integrated approach of data processing along with the neural network classifier provides more satisfactory results for the classification and prediction problem. Our finding indicates that utilizing simple supervised learning with an optimum model parameter yield comparable scores as a complex neural network classifier.