Machine Learning in Electrofacies Classification and Subsurface Lithology Interpretation: A Rough Set Theory Approach

Abstract

Initially, electrofacies were introduced to define a set of recorded well log responses in order to characterize and distinguish a bed from the other rock units, as an advancement to the conventional application of well logs. Well logs are continuous records of several physical properties of drilled rocks that can be related to different lithologies by experienced log analysts. This work is time consuming and likely to be imperfect because human analysis is subjective. Thus, any automated classification approach with high promptness and accuracy is very welcome by log analysts. One of the crucial requirements in petroleum engineering is to interpret a bed’s lithology, which can be done by grouping a formation into electrofacies. In the past, geophysical modelling, petro-physical analysis, artificial intelligence and several statistical method approaches have been implemented to interpret lithology. In this research, important well log features are selected by using the Extra Tree Classifier (ETC), and then five individual electrofacies are constructed by using the selected well log features. Finally, a rough set theory (RST)-based whitebox classification approach is proposed to classify the electrofacies by generating decision rules. These rules are later on used to determine the lithology classes and we found that RST is beneficial for performing data mining tasks such as data classification and rule extraction from uncertain and vague well log datasets. A comparison study is also provided, where we use support vector machine (SVM), deep learning based on feedforward multilayer perceptron (MLP) and random forest classifier (RFC) to compare the electrofacies classification accuracy.