Evaluation of complex petroleum reservoirs based on data mining methods

In this study, we introduce the application of data mining to petroleum exploration and development to obtain high-performance predictive models and optimal classifications of geology, reservoirs, reservoir beds, and fluid properties. Data mining is a practical method for finding characteristics of, and inherent laws in massive multi-dimensional data. The data mining method is primarily composed of three loops, which are feature selection, model parameter optimization, and model performance evaluation. The method’s key techniques involve applying genetic algorithms to carry out feature selection and parameter optimization and using repeated cross-validation methods to obtain unbiased estimation of generalization accuracy. The optimal model is finally selected from the various algorithms tested. In this paper, the evaluation of water-flooded layers and the classification of conglomerate reservoirs in Karamay oil field are selected as case studies to analyze comprehensively two important functions in data mining, namely predictive modeling and cluster analysis. For the evaluation of water-flooded layers, six feature subset schemes and five distinct types of data mining methods (decision trees, artificial neural networks, support vector machines, Bayesian networks, and ensemble learning) are analyzed and compared. The results clearly demonstrate that decision trees are superior to the other methods in terms of predictive model accuracy and interpretability. Therefore, a decision tree-based model is selected as the final model for identifying water-flooded layers in the conglomerate reservoir. For the reservoir classification, the reservoir classification standards from four types of clustering algorithms, such as those based on division, level, model, and density, are comparatively analyzed. The results clearly indicate that the clustering derived from applying the standard K-means algorithm, which is based on division, provides the best fit to the geological characteristics of the actual reservoir and the greatest accuracy of reservoir classification. Moreover, the internal measurement parameters of this algorithm, such as compactness, efficiency, and resolution, are all better than those of the other three algorithms. Compared with traditional methods from exploration geophysics, the data mining method has obvious advantages in solving problems involving calculation of reservoir parameters and reservoir classification using different specialized field data. Hence, the effective application of data mining methods can provide better services for petroleum exploration and development.