Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation Framework for Logging Lithofacies Identification

Summary Reservoir lithofacies type is an important indicator of reservoir quality and oiliness, and understanding lithofacies type can help geologists and engineers make informed decisions about exploration and development activities. The use of well-log data to establish machine learning models for lithofacies identification has gained popularity; however, the assumption that data are independent identical distribution followed by these models is often unrealistic. Additionally, there is a possible incompatibility between the training and test data in terms of feature space dimensions. We propose the heterogeneous domain adaptation framework for logging lithofacies identification (HDAFLI) to address these problems. The framework comprises three main contributions: (i) The denoising autoencoder feature mapping (DAFM) module is adopted to resolve the incompatibility issue in feature space between training and test data. The connection between training and test data can be effectively established to improve the performance and generalization ability. (ii) The transferability and discriminative joint probability distribution adaptive (TDJPDA) module addresses the issue of data distribution differences. It improves the transferability of training and test data by minimizing the maximum mean difference (MMD) of the joint probabilities of the source and target domains and enhances their discriminative ability by maximizing the joint probability MMD of different lithofacies categories. (iii) Bayesian optimization is used to optimize hyperparameters in the light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) model for high computational efficiency in determining the best accuracy. We selected well-logging data from eight wells in the Pearl River Mouth Basin of the South China Sea to design four tasks and compared HDAFLI with various baseline machine learning algorithms and baseline domain adaptive algorithms. The results show that HDAFLI has the highest average accuracy among the four tasks. It is 19.76% and 8.94% higher than the best-performing baseline machine learning algorithm and baseline domain adaptive method among the comparison algorithms, respectively. For HDAFLI, we also conducted ablation experiments, time cost and convergence performance analysis, parameter sensitivity experiments, and feature visualization experiments. The results of ablation experiments show that the three modules of HDAFLI all play an active role, working together to achieve the best results. In addition, HDAFLI has a reasonable time cost, can become stable after several iterations, and has good convergence performance. The results of parameter sensitivity experiments confirm that the accuracy of HDAFLI does not change significantly with changes in hyperparameters, which is robust. The results of feature visualization experiments show that the data of the training set and the test set are concentrated together to a certain extent, which indicates that HDAFLI has completed the task of data distribution alignment very well. The findings of this study can help for a better understanding of how to address the challenge of reservoir lithofacies identification through a heterogeneous domain adaptation framework. By solving the problem of feature space incompatibility and data distribution difference between training data and test data, the application of HDAFLI provides geologists and engineers with more accurate lithofacies classification tools. This study has practical application value for reservoir quality assessment, oiliness prediction, and exploration and development decision-making.