Shear sonic log prediction with Deep Neural Networks: an

example from Gulf of Mexico

Felipe F Melo, Verónica Pérez, ChungShen Lee
GeoSoftware

Summary
We build a deep neural network model to predict the shear sonic log in field in the Gulf of Mexico.
The dataset has six wells for training the model and a test well is used to predict the shear sonic
log. Each well has nine well logs, thus we performed data augmentation to avoid overfitting when
training the model. The deep neural network has two hidden layers, analysis of training and
validation data does not show variance in the model. The results of the shear sonic log prediction
on the test data were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. Qualitatively, in the interest area
the predicted data shows a good fit with the original well log. Quantitatively, the prediction score
of ninety-two percent confirms the good result of our application.
Introduction
In exploration wells, shear sonic log data is not always acquired or reliable. However, these well
logs are essential to compute other logs, as shear velocity, and for reservoir characterization to
discriminate lithology and fluids (Pendrel and Schouten, 2021). In wells where the shear sonic log
is not acquired, commonly, the shear wave velocity is estimated by theory-based methods, such
as Castagna et al. (1985), Greenberg and Castagana (1992) and Xu and White (1996). On the
other hand, data science-based methods can predict complex non-linear relationships
(Goodfellow et al., 2016) and they have been used as an alternative to log prediction in the oil
industry (Downton et al., 2020; Jenson et al., 2021).
Dataset
The study area consists of two vertically stacked shelf-edge delta systems, in the middle Pliocene
od Mississippi Canyon block 109, in the Gulf of Mexico. The depositional environment is a shelf-
edge delta proposed by Mayall et al. (1992). The shelf-edge area consists of slumps that are not
developed to the same extent in all wells, turbidites trapped in the upper slope between slump
topography, prograding sandy mouth bars and relatively undeformed upper slope area.

The dataset is composed by seven wells with nine well logs in each. The selected well logs for
this work are: Density, Gamma Ray, Compressional Sonic (P-sonic), Porosity Neutron, Porosity
Effective, Resistivity Measured, Water Saturation (Sw), Volume of Clay (V Clay) and Shear Sonic
(S-Sonic). Figure 1a shows a map view with the wells, the field location and block coordinates.
Figure 1b shows a seismic section crossing all the wells, the zone of interest is between the red
and green horizons. The test data for this work is Well 5, highlighted in black in Figure 1. Figure
2 shows the well logs and well tops from Well 1, a typical well from the field.

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 a) b)

Figure 1: Input wells. a) Distribution of the wells in map view. b) Section view of a seismic crossing all wells with the
main interpreted horizons. Test data, Well 5, is highlighted in black.

Figure 2: Input well logs and well tops from Well 1.

Method
The dataset was divided in training and test data, where Well 5 (highlighted in black in Figure 1)
is the test data and S-Sonic log is the target. Additionally, the measured depth of each well is
used for training the deep neural network model. The training data has 44065 samples per feature
and the test data has 6529 samples per feature. For data analysis, we checked the quality of the
data and searched for outliers (not present in the data), in addition, we checked for linearities.
Figure 3 shows the Pearson correlation plot, with the values of the linear correlation for each pair

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 of logs. High correlation (trends) is observed
between four pairs of logs: Gamma Ray and V
Clay, Gamma Ray and Porosity Effective, and
Porosity Effective and V Clay, and P-Sonic and
S-sonic. The first three trends are expected
because these logs are generated from the
same log. The last trend is expected from the
theory-based methods. Our tests (not shown)
proved that using these logs increased the
score of the results.

After data analysis, to create and train the

model, the training data was divided in training
data, with 70% of samples, and validation data,
with 30% of samples. There are nine features
(well logs), including the measured depth log, Figure 3: Person correlation plot of the training data.
and excluding the S-Sonic, which is the well log
to be predicted. Therefore, to avoid overfitting, we performed data augmentation (Chollet, 2021).
Data augmentation generates more training data from existing training samples by augmenting
the samples. In this case, we generate polynomial combinations of the features with degree equal
two to add non-linearities to the data (Pedregosa et al., 2011). Thus, the number of features
increase from nine to fitty-four features. The features are scaled to lie between a given minimum
and maximum value (Pedregosa et al., 2011) before training.

The deep neural network architecture (Chollet, 2015) consists of an input layer, two hidden layers
and an output layer. Where, the first hidden layer has thirty-two nodes, and the second hidden
layer has sixteen nodes. The loss function to be minimized during the training is the mean squared
error (mse), the optimizer is Adam and for measure the success we want to monitor during training
and validation we used the mean absolute error (mae) as metrics. The model was trained in fifty
epochs and the results of the training and validation losses are shown in Figure 4a, and metrics
are shown in Figure 4b. Note that the model has no variance because the curves decay smoothly.
a) b)

Figure 4: Training and validation: a) loss with mean squared error and b) metrics as mean absolute error.

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 Results
Figure 5 shows scatter plots of the True and Predicted S-Sonic log values for the train, validation,
and test data. The red line is the identity line, and the scatter plot shows some samples out of
range. The coefficient of determination R2 is shown in the left upper part of each plot. The results
on the test data, the predicted S-Sonic log, show the good fit with the score of 92%.

Figure 6 shows the log plot of the true S-sonic log (target) in gray and the predicted S-Sonic log
in orange. As already shown quantitatively, there is a good prediction. There are some misfits in
the shallowest part of the logs. However, the zone of interest, between the red and green tops,
shows a good fit.

Figure 5: Scatter plots with the True and Predicted S-Sonic log values for each stage of the workflow, R2 is shown.

Conclusions
We predicted a shear sonic log in an area with few available
wells with a deep neural network model. This was possible
because of data augmentation, to increase the number of
features, and the architecture of the network. The prediction
results qualitatively shows the good fit in the interval of interest
and a misfit of some samples in the shallow depths.
Quantitatively the score of ninety-two percent shows the
overall success of the model in predicting the shear sonic log.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Talos Energy for permission to
show these data. We also thank GeoSoftware and the
developers of the Jason Workbench for the support.

Figure 6: Log view of the true S-Sonic log in

gray and the predicted S-Sonic log in
orange.

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