Synthetic Sonic Log Generation With Machine Learning: A Contest Summary From Five Methods

Abstract

Compressional and shear sonic traveltime logs (DTC and DTS, respectively) are crucial for subsurface characterization and seismic-well tie. However, these two logs are often missing or incomplete in many oil and gas wells. Therefore, many petrophysical and geophysical workflows include sonic log synthetization or pseudo-log generation based on multivariate regression or rock physics relations. Started on March 1, 2020, and concluded on May 7, 2020, the SPWLA PDDA SIG hosted a contest aiming to predict the DTC and DTS logs from seven “easy-to-acquire” conventional logs using machine-learning methods (GitHub, 2020). In the contest, a total number of 20,525 data points with half-foot resolution from three wells was collected to train regression models using machine-learning techniques. Each data point had seven features, consisting of the conventional “easy-to-acquire” logs: caliper, neutron porosity, gamma ray (GR), deep resistivity, medium resistivity, photoelectric factor, and bulk density, respectively, as well as two sonic logs (DTC and DTS) as the target. The separate data set of 11,089 samples from a fourth well was then used as the blind test data set. The prediction performance of the model was evaluated using root mean square error (RMSE) as the metric, shown in the equation below: RMSE=sqrt(1/2*1/m* [∑_(i=1)^m▒〖(〖DTC〗_pred^i-〖DTC〗_true^i)〗^2 + 〖(〖DTS〗_pred^i-〖DTS〗_true^i)〗^2 ] In the benchmark model, (Yu et al., 2020), we used a Random Forest regressor and conducted minimal preprocessing to the training data set; an RMSE score of 17.93 was achieved on the test data set. The top five models from the contest, on average, beat the performance of our benchmark model by 27% in the RMSE score. In the paper, we will review these five solutions, including preprocess techniques and different machine-learning models, including neural network, long short-term memory (LSTM), and ensemble trees. We found that data cleaning and clustering were critical for improving the performance in all models.