Application of Multiboost-KELM algorithm to alleviate the collinearity of log curves for evaluating the abundance of organic matter in marine mud shale reservoirs: a case study in Sichuan Basin, China

The total organic carbon (TOC) content reflects the abundance of organic matter in marine mud shale reservoirs and reveals the hydrocarbon potential of the reservoir. Traditional TOC calculation methods based on statistical and machine learning have limited effect in improving the computational accuracy of marine mud shale reservoirs. In this study, the collinearity between log curves of marine mud shale reservoirs was revealed for the first time, which was found to be adverse to the improvement of TOC calculation accuracy. To this end, a new TOC prediction method was proposed based on Multiboost-Kernel extreme learning machine (Multiboost-KELM) bridging geostatistics and machine learning technique. The proposed method not only has good data mining ability, generalization ability and sound adaptivity to small samples, but also has the ability to improve the computational accuracy by reducing the effect of collinearity between logging curves. In prediction of two mud shale reservoirs of Sichuan basin with proposed model, the results showed that the predicted value of TOC was in good consistence with the measured value. The root-mean-square error of TOC predicting results was reduced from 0.415 (back-propagation neural networks) to 0.203 and 1.117 (back-propagation neural networks) to 0.357, respectively; the relative error value decreased by up to 8.9%. The Multiboost-KELM algorithm proposed in this paper can effectively improve the prediction accuracy of TOC in marine mud shale reservoir.