Adaptive boosting of random forest algorithm for automatic petrophysical interpretation of well logs

The power of Machine Learning is demonstrated for automatic interpretation of well logs and determining reservoir properties for volume of shale, porosity, and water saturation respectively for tight clastic sequences. Random Forest algorithms are reputed for their efficiency as they belong to a class of algorithms called ensemble methods, which are traditionally seen as weak learners, but can be transformed into strong performers and they promise to deliver highly accurate results. The study area is located offshore Australia in the Poseidon and Crown fields situated in the Browse Basin, which are gas fields in tight complex clastic reservoirs. There are 5 wells used in this study with one well manually interpreted which is subsequently used in developing a machine learning model which predicts the output for the other 4 wells. The basic open hole logs namely Natural gamma ray, Resistivity, Neutron Porosity, Bulk Density, P-wave and S-wave sonic travel-time, are used in interpretation. One of the wells has a missing S-wave travel-time log which was also predicted by developing a Random Forest Machine Learning model. The results indicate a very robust improvement in performance when Random Forest algorithm was combined with Adaptive Boosting when interpreting the well logs. The training accuracy using Random Forest alone was 98.21%, but testing was 77.62% which suggested over-fitting by the Random Forest model. The Adaptive Boosting of the Random Forest algorithm resulted in the overall training accuracy of 99.40% and an overall testing accuracy of 97.03%, indicating a drastic improvement in performance. S-wave travel-time log was predicted by preparing a training set consisting of Natural gamma ray, Resistivity, Neutron Porosity, Bulk Density, and P-wave travel-time logs for the 4 wells using Random Forest which gave a training accuracy of 99.79% and a testing accuracy of 98.54%. Machine learning algorithms can be successfully applied for interpreting well log data in complex sedimentary environment and their performance can be drastically improved using Adaptive Boosting.