Application of Artificial Neural Networks in Geoscience and Petroleum Industry

It has been shown that artificial neural networks (ANNs), as a method of artificial intelligence, have the potential to increase the ability of problem-solving to geoscience and petroleum industry problems, particularly in case of limited availability or lack of input data. ANN application has become widespread in engineering including geoscience and petroleum engineering because it has shown to be able to produce reasonable outputs for inputs it has not learned how to deal with. In this chapter, the following subjects are covered: artificial neural networks basics (neurons, activation function, ANN structure), feed-forward ANN, backpropagation and learning (perceptrons and backpropagation, multilayer ANNs and backpropagation algorithm), data processing by ANN (training, over-fitting, testing, validation), ANN and statistical parameters, an applied example of ANN, and applications of ANN in Geoscience and Petroleum Engineering.