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Performance Evaluation of Swanson’s Rule for the Case of Log-Normal Populations

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Earth System Sciences ((LNESS))

Abstract

In the petroleum literature, Swanson’s Rule (SR) has been promoted as a superior alternative to the arithmetic average (AA) to estimate the mean value of reservoir properties. In this study, we assess SR performance in several areas, including bias and efficiency, when the population is log-normal and compare them to the AA. We find that SR is more efficient and has smaller standard error than the AA for large variability cases. Hence replacing the AA with the SR may have statistical benefits but the significant bias of SR can have important engineering and economic consequences, illustrated here by two examples.

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Acknowledgments

MM was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. JLJ holds the Schulich Chair in Geostatistics.

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Correspondence to Maryam Moghadasi .

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Moghadasi, M., Jensen, J.L. (2014). Performance Evaluation of Swanson’s Rule for the Case of Log-Normal Populations. In: Pardo-Igúzquiza, E., Guardiola-Albert, C., Heredia, J., Moreno-Merino, L., Durán, J., Vargas-Guzmán, J. (eds) Mathematics of Planet Earth. Lecture Notes in Earth System Sciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32408-6_1

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