A Novel Homogenous Hybridization Scheme for Performance Improvement of Support Vector Machines Regression in Reservoir Characterization

Abstract

Hybrid computational intelligence is defined as a combination of multiple intelligent algorithms such that the resulting model has superior performance to the individual algorithms. Therefore, the importance of fusing two or more intelligent algorithms to achieve better performance cannot be overemphasized. In this work, a novel homogenous hybridization scheme is proposed for the improvement of the generalization and predictive ability of support vector machines regression (SVR). The proposed and developed hybrid SVR (HSVR) works by considering the initial SVR prediction as a feature extraction process and then employs the SVR output, which is the extracted feature, as its sole descriptor. The developed hybrid model is applied to the prediction of reservoir permeability and the predicted permeability is compared to core permeability which is regarded as standard in petroleum industry. The results show that the proposed hybrid scheme (HSVR) performed better than the existing SVR in both generalization and prediction ability. The outcome of this research will assist petroleum engineers to effectively predict permeability of carbonate reservoirs with higher degree of accuracy and will invariably lead to better reservoir. Furthermore, the encouraging performance of this hybrid will serve as impetus for further exploring homogenous hybrid system.