Abstract This work is focused on exploring the applicability of intelligent methods in assessing porosity and permeability in the context of reservoir characterization. The main motivation underlying our study is that appropriate estimation of reservoir petrophysical parameters such as porosity and/or permeability is a key step for in-situ hydrocarbon reservoir evaluation. We ground our analysis on information on log-depth, caliper, conductivity, sonic logging, natural gamma, density and neutron porosity, water saturation, percentage of shale volume, and type of lithology collected from well loggings in an oil field in the middle-east (a total number of 11 exploratory wells are considered). Data also include porosities and permeabilities evaluated on core samples from the same wells. All these data are embedded in a neural network-based approach which enables us to establish input-output relationships in terms of an optimized number of input variables. Three diverse intelligent techniques are tested. These include: (i) classical artificial neural networks; (ii) artificial neural networks based on principal component analysis (PCA) transformation; and (iii) statistical neural networks based on a bagging approach. Our results suggest that the statistical neural network is most effective for the field setting considered. The application of this neural network with 9 input parameters provides reliable performances in 94% and 81% of the cases, respectively in the training and validation phases, for the estimation of porosity. A trained network with 10 input parameters leads to successfull reproduction of permeability values in 85% and 79.5% of the cases, respectively during training and validation of the network. Results from this study are expected to be transferable to applications involving evaluation of petrophysical properties of a target reservoir in the presence of incomplete well log datasets.