Recurrent Neural Networks for Oil Well Event Prediction

Abstract

We have conducted a comparison between three types of recurrent neural networks and their ability to predict anomalies occurring in oil wells using a publicly available dataset. We have included two types of well-known state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks and a new type with neurons evolved specifically for the dataset using automatic programming. We show that the new type of recurrent neuron offers a massive improvement over the state of the art. The overall test accuracy of the new network type is 94.6%, which is an improvement by 18.3%, or 14.6 percentage points. We also show that a network with the new neuron performs better than any other solution proposed for the dataset.