AccScience Publishing / JSE / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/JSE026270122
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Physics-guided well-family multi-expert ensemble model for in situ stress prediction using well logs

Naihao Liu1,2 ,  Yuwei Liu1,2* ,  Xiwu Liu1,2 ,  Yongyi Huang3 ,  Xinyu Wang1,2
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1 State Key Laboratory of Shale Oil and Gas Enrichment Mechanisms and Efficient Development, Beijing , China
2 Key Laboratory of Oil & Gas Reservoir Geophysics, SINOPEC, Beijing , China
3 Department of Computer Science, College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi , China
Received: 1 July 2026 | Revised: 22 August 2026 | Accepted: 24 August 2026 | Published online: 28 October 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Accurate estimation of in situ stress from conventional well logs is challenging when stress measurements are available for only a few wells and blind wells differ in pressure regime, logged interval, or curve baseline. We propose a physics-guided well-family multi-expert ensemble for predicting maximum and minimum horizontal in situ stresses (SHMAX and SHMIN). Conventional logs are augmented with overburden and effective-stress proxies, pressure interactions, local curve descriptors, and well-level statistics. The model comprises Direct, depth-normalized, and Physics-residual extremely randomized trees (ExtraTrees) experts trained on 10 development wells. Development-well leave-one-well-out predictions determine the three-expert blend weights, whereas an absolute 54 MPa/1,600 m routing rule is frozen before final expert fitting and blind-well evaluation. Labels from the eight blind test wells are not used for feature construction, weight selection, expert fitting, route assignment, or prediction. In cumulative ablation, the sample-weighted average mean absolute error (MAE) decreases from 1.8437 MPa for raw logs plus ExtraTrees to 1.3776 MPa after physics-guided feature construction, 1.2564 MPa after multi-expert blending, and 0.9589 MPa after the complete fixed 54 MPa/1,600 m gate. The final SHMAX and SHMIN MAEs are 1.0284 and 0.8894 MPa, respectively; the average MAE is 0.9589 MPa, and the average  is 0.9819. These results indicate complementary contributions from physics-guided representation, target-space diversification, and well-level routing; however, generalizability remains limited by the single-basin, 18-well dataset.

Keywords
In situ stress prediction
ExtraTrees
Physics-guided learning
Multi-expert ensemble
Well-family gating
Funding
This research was supported by the Key Laboratory of Oil & Gas Reservoir Geophysics of Sinopec under the project “A New Technology for Predicting Geomechanical Parameters between Wells in Eastern Continental Shale Oil Reservoirs Driven by Seismic Waves.”
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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Journal of Seismic Exploration, Print ISSN: 0963-0651, Published by AccScience Publishing