A Symbolic Tree Model for Oil and Gas Production Prediction Using Time-Series Production Data

Oil and gas well production prediction takes place in early stages of production to estimate future recovery. A data driven workflow is proposed in this paper to construct a symbolic tree model to predict new well production using historic time-series production data of analogous wells. Production data are firstly aggregated and symbolized for dimensionality reduction and data discretization of time-series data. A symbolic tree is constructed on time-series symbol sequences, and pre-pruning mechanisms – minimum node size and spatial information gain – are integrated to achieve a compact and informative tree. A coverage index is used to assess the tree size. A case study was conducted applying the proposed workflow to shale gas wells in Montney-A pool in Canada. It has proved the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed method.