a b s t r a c tThe ensemble learning paradigm has proved to be relevant to solving most challenging industrial problems. Despite its successful application especially in the Bioinformatics, the petroleum industry has not benefited enough from the promises of this machine learning technology. The petroleum industry, with its persistent quest for high-performance predictive models, is in great need of this new learning methodology. A marginal improvement in the prediction indices of petroleum reservoir properties could have huge positive impact on the success of exploration, drilling and the overall reservoir management portfolio. Support vector machines (SVM) is one of the promising machine learning tools that have performed excellently well in most prediction problems. However, its performance is a function of the prudent choice of its tuning parameters most especially the regularization parameter, C. Reports have shown that this parameter has significant impact on the performance of SVM. Understandably, no specific value has been recommended for it. This paper proposes a stacked generalization ensemble model of SVM that incorporates different expert opinions on the optimal values of this parameter in the prediction of porosity and permeability of petroleum reservoirs using datasets from diverse geological formations. The performance of the proposed SVM ensemble was compared to that of conventional SVM technique, another SVM implemented with the bagging method, and Random Forest technique. The results showed that the proposed ensemble model, in most cases, outperformed the others with the highest correlation coefficient, and the lowest mean and absolute errors. The study indicated that there is a great potential for ensemble learning in petroleum reservoir characterization to improve the accuracy of reservoir properties predictions for more successful explorations and increased production of petroleum resources. The results also confirmed that ensemble models perform better than the conventional SVM implementation.
Estimation of the residual strength of corroded reinforced concrete beams has been studied from experimental and theoretical perspectives. The former is arduous as it involves casting beams of various sizes, which are then subjected to various degrees of corrosion damage. The latter are static; hence cannot be generalized as new coefficients need to be re-generated for new cases. This calls for dynamic models that are adaptive to new cases and offer efficient generalization capability. Computational intelligence techniques have been applied in Construction Engineering modeling problems. However, these techniques have not been adequately applied to the problem addressed in this paper. This study extends the empirical model proposed by Azad et al. (Mag Concr Res 62(6):405-414, 2010), which considered all the adverse effects of corrosion on steel. We proposed four artificial neural networks (ANN) models to predict the residual flexural strength of corroded RC beams using the same data from Azad et al. (2010). We employed two modes of prediction: through the correction factor (C f ) and through the residual strength (M res ). For each mode, we studied the effect of fixed and random data stratification on the performance of the models. The results of the ANN models were found to be in good agreement with experimental values. When compared with the results of Azad et al. (2010), the ANN model with randomized data stratification gave a C f -based prediction with up to 49 % improvement in correlation coefficient and 92 % error reduction. This confirms the reliability of ANN over the empirical models.
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