Inverse distance interpolation for facies modeling

Inverse distance weighted interpolation is a robust and widely used estimation technique. In practical applications, inverse distance interpolation is oftentimes favored over kriging-based techniques when there is a problem of making meaningful estimates of the field spatial structure. Nowadays application of inverse distance interpolation is limited to continuous random variable modeling. There is a need to extend the approach to categorical/discrete random variables. In this paper we propose such an extension using indicator formalism. The applicability of inverse distance interpolation for categorical modeling is then illustrated using Total’s Joslyn Lease facies data.