Automated machine learning for borehole resistivity measurements

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) offer a real-time solution for the inversion of borehole resistivity measurements to approximate forward and inverse operators. It is possible to use extremely large DNNs to approximate the operators, but it demands a considerable training time. Moreover, evaluating the network after training also requires a significant amount of memory and processing power. In addition, we may overfit the model. In this work, we propose a scoring function that accounts for the accuracy and size of the DNNs compared to a reference DNN that provides a good approximation for the operators. Using this scoring function, we use DNN architecture search algorithms to obtain a quasi-optimal DNN smaller than the reference network; hence, it requires less computational effort during training and evaluation. The quasi-optimal DNN delivers comparable accuracy to the original large DNN.