Permeability Predictions for Tight Sandstone Reservoir Using Explainable Machine Learning and Particle Swarm Optimization

High-precision permeability prediction is of great significance to tight sandstone reservoirs. However, while considerable progress has recently been made in the machine learning based prediction of reservoir permeability, the generalization of this approach is limited by weak interpretability. Hence, an interpretable XGBoost model is proposed herein based on particle swarm optimization to predict the permeability of tight sandstone reservoirs with higher accuracy and robust interpretability. The porosity and permeability of 202 core plugs and 6 logging curves (namely, the gamma-ray (GR) curve, the acoustic curve (AC), the spontaneous potential (SP) curve, the caliper (CAL) curve, the deep lateral resistivity (RILD) curve, and eight lateral resistivity (RFOC) curve) are extracted along with three derived variables (i.e., the shale content, the AC slope, and the GR slope) as data sets. Based on the data preprocessing, global and local interpretations are performed according to the Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) analysis, and the redundant features in the data set are screened to identify the porosity, AC, CAL, and GR slope as the four most important features. The particle swarm optimization algorithm is then used to optimize the hyperparameters of the XGBoost model. The prediction results of the PSO-XGBoost model indicate a superior performance compared with that of the benchmark XGBoost model. In addition, the reliable application of the interpretable PSO-XGBoost model in the prediction of tight sandstone reservoir permeability is examined by comparing the results with those of two traditional mathematical regression models, five machine learning models, and three deep learning models. Thus, the interpretable PSO-XGBoost model is shown to have more advantages in permeability prediction along with the lowest root mean square error, thereby confirming the effectiveness and practicability of this method.