Fracture‐frequency prediction from borehole wireline logs using artificial neural networks [Note 1. Received June 1998, revision accepted March 1999. ...]

Borehole‐wall imaging is currently the most reliable means of mapping discontinuities within boreholes. As these imaging techniques are expensive and thus not always included in a logging run, a method of predicting fracture frequency directly from traditional logging tool responses would be very useful and cost effective. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) show great potential in this area. ANNs are computational systems that attempt to mimic natural biological neural networks. They have the ability to recognize patterns and develop their own generalizations about a given data set. Neural networks are trained on data sets for which the solution is known and tested on data not previously seen in order to validate the network result. We show that artificial neural networks, due to their pattern recognition capabilities, are able to assess the signal strength of fracture‐related heterogeneity in a borehole log and thus fracture frequency within a borehole. A combination of wireline logs (neutron porosity, bulk density, P‐sonic, S‐sonic, deep resistivity and shallow resistivity) were used as input parameters to the ANN. Fracture frequency calculated from borehole televiewer data was used as the single output parameter. The ANN was trained using a back‐propagation algorithm with a momentum learning function. In addition to fracture frequency within a single borehole, an ANN trained on a subset of boreholes in an area could be used for prediction over the entire set of boreholes, thus allowing the lateral correlation of fracture zones.