Borehole lithology modelling with scarce labels by deep transductive learning

Abstract

Geophysical logging is a geo-scientific instrument that detects information such as electric, acoustic, and radioactive properties of a well. Its data plays a vital role in interpreting subsurface geology. However, since logging data is an indirect reflection of rocks, it requires the construction of a logging interpretation model in combination with core samples. Obtaining and analysing all core samples in a well is not practical due to their enormous cost, leading to the problem of scarce core sample labels. This problem can be addressed using semi-supervised learning. Existing studies on lithology identification using logging data mostly utilize graph-based semi-supervised learning, which requires known features to establish a graph Laplacian matrix. Therefore, these methods often use logging values at certain depths to construct feature vectors and cannot learn the shape information of logging curves. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning method with feature learning capability based on semi-supervised generative adversarial network (SSGAN) to learn the shape information of logging curves while utilizing unlabelled logging curves. Additionally, considering the problem of insufficient use of labels when dividing a validation set in extremely scarce-label situations, we propose a strategy of weighted averaging of three sub-models, which effectively improves model performance. We verify the effectiveness of our proposed method on five wells and demonstrate the mechanism of semi-supervised learning using adversarial learning through extensive visualization methods.