Identifying the number of oil families in petroleum basins provides practical and valuable information in petroleum geochemistry studies from exploration to development. Oil family grouping helps us track migration pathways, identify the number of active source rock(s), and examine the reservoir continuity. To date, almost in all oil family typing studies, common statistical methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering analysis (HCA) have been used. However, there is no publication regarding using artificial neural networks (ANNs) for examining the oil families in petroleum basins. Hence, oil family typing requires novel, not overused and common techniques. This paper is the first report of oil family typing using ANNs as robust computational methods. To this end, a self-organization map (SOM) neural network associated with three clustering validity indices were employed on oil samples belonging to the Iranian part of the Persian Gulf’ oilfields. For the SOM network, at first, ten default clusters were selected. Afterwards, three effective clustering validity coefficients, namely Calinski-Harabasz (CH), Silhouette indexes (SI) and Davies-Bouldin (DB), were operated to find the optimum number of clusters. Accordingly, among ten default clusters, the maximum CH (62) and SI (0.58) were acquired for four clusters. Likewise, the lowest DB (0.8) was obtained for four clusters. Thus, all three validation coefficients introduced four clusters as the optimum number of clusters or oil families. The number of oil families identified in the present report is consistent with those previously reported by other researchers in the same study area. However, the techniques used in the present paper, which have not been implemented so far, can be introduced as more straightforward for clustering purposes in the oil family typing than those of common and overused methods of PCA and HCA.
ALTERNATIVE TERMINATION CRITERION FOR K-SPECIFIED CRISP DATA CLUSTERING ALGORITHMS