Probabilistic Machine Learning in Structural Geology

As the number of underground activities increase, the need for better understanding of the geospatial properties become more and more essential for correct engineering designs and optimal decision making. However, gathering subsurface data is still an extremely costly and imprecise endeavour. Geological modelling has played a crucial role for years helping to understand and correlate the complex geometries encountered underground but single deterministic models fail to capture all possible configurations given the limited data. Probabilistic machine learning allows to integrate domain knowledge and observations of the physical world on a rigorous and consistent manner. Inferences to the probabilistic model implements an automatic learning-from-observations process.

 

In this work, we show how by embedding state-of-the-art implicit interpolants into probabilistic frameworks, we can integrate the information of distinct data sets in one single common earth model. We will present results from a minimal working example to introduce Bayesian statistics, to full 3-D probabilistic inversions. All the models used for this demonstration are implemented in the open-source library GemPy ( www.gempy.org) allowing full reproducibility of the results.