Despite recent improvements in collected drilling data quality and volume, the actual number of wells being used in studies remain low and are often limited to a single source and oil field, producing results that are prone to overfitting and are non-transferable.

In our study, we access oil drilling data from 5 of more than 20 oil drilling companies collected from 2005 to 2016 from our industrial partner to create well drilling duration models for well planning. This project could lead to the creation of more generalized models from larger datasets than others in literature. However, the data is difficult to process without expert knowledge, further complicated by properties such as unharmonized, source-locked, semantic heterogeneity, sparse and unlabelled. Conventional automated methods for feature selection, propositionalization, multi-source, or block-wise missing techniques could not be used.

In this paper, we describe our method to assist the Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) Selection stage of the abovementioned data - Feature Selection before Propositionalization (FSbP) via Database Attribute Health Feature Reduction (DAHFR) and Report Feature Correlation Matrix (RFCM), collectively known as FvDR. DAHFR and RFCM are filter-type feature selection techniques that could measure relational missingness and keyword correlations respectively despite the complexity of multi-source oil drilling data. FvDR successfully reduced the scope from 700 tables containing 20,000 columns to 22 tables containing fewer than 707 columns while successfully selecting 13 of 16 relevant tables suggested by literature. Despite the loss of information from limitations of subsequent KDD procedures, preliminary models show promising results with over half the test predictions falling within the 20% error margin required for well planning. FvDR proves to be indispensable in KDD as a FSbP framework as it reduces features for examination and streamlines the research process necessary to understand business rules for data harmonization and propositionalization.

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Feature Selection Before Propositionalization of Multi-Source Oil Drilling Data