Petroleum Analytics Learning Machine (or PALM) system is a machine learning based, “brutally empirical” analysis system for use in all upstream and midstream oil and gas operations. PALM system optimizes exploration, production and gathering from at least one well of oil and natural gas fields to maximize production while minimizing costs. Normalized data are processed to determine clusters of correlation in multi-dimensional space to identify a machine learned ranking of importance weights for each attribute. Predictive and prescriptive optimization on the normalized data is performed utilizing unique combinations of machine learning and statistical algorithm ensembles. The unstructured textual data are classified to correlate with optimal production to capture the dynamics of at least one or more wells of oil and natural gas fields and to provide categorization results from labeled data sets to identify patterns.