Model Comparison for Esp Run-Life Prediction: Classic Statistics Vs. Machine Learning

Electrical Submersible Pumps reliability and run-life analysis has been extensively studied since its development. Current machine learning algorithms allow to correlate operational conditions to ESP run-life in order to generate predictions for active and new wells. Four machine learning models are compared to a linear proportional hazards model, used as a baseline for comparison purposes. Proper accuracy metrics for survival analysis problems are calculated on run-life predictions vs. actual values over training and validation data subsets. Results demonstrate that the baseline model is able to produce more consistent predictions with a slight reduction in its accuracy, compared to current machine learning models for small datasets. This study demonstrates that the quality of the date and it pre-processing supports the current shift from model-centric to data-centric approach to machine and deep learning problems.