Wax precipitation prediction using a novel intelligent method: Modeling and data analysis

Despite the complexity of thermodynamic models in predicting wax precipitation, they have not shown satisfactory results in the literature. This paper proposes the least-squares support vector machine optimized by the genetic algorithm to forecast wax precipitation based on the mole fractions, specific gravity, and temperature of crude oil samples. The genetic algorithm was used to prevent sticking in local optima in optimizing the parameters of the predictive model. A dataset of 88 experimental wax precipitation samples was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results revealed that the suggested algorithm could predict wax precipitation with an accuracy of 0.939 and 0.997 before and after sensitivity analysis, respectively. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis improved the Coefficient of Determination, Mean Squared Error, and Root Mean Squared Error from 0.939, 0.768, and 0.877 to 0.997, 0.041, and 0.202, respectively. The results were compared with the results of previous data-driven and mathematical models that showed the outperformance of the proposed method. The contribution of this paper can be summarized as demonstrating the ability of intelligent models to predict wax precipitation without a need for complex thermodynamic models. Also, it was shown that a proper feature selection could improve the model's performance.