A hydrocarbon field including thief zones can be modeled based on production history data and supplemental data constraining a thief-zone distribution across the field. In various embodiments, a numerical optimization approach involves creating a plurality of model thief-zone distributions with varying parameter values, parameterizing permeability maps obtained for the thief-zone distributions and aggregating across the thief-zone distributions to obtain distributions of coefficients associated with the parameterization, and then iteratively sampling the coefficient distributions, determining a permeability map of the model based on the selected coefficients, and measuring a deviation between the measured production history data and simulated production history data derived from the computational model until a match is achieved.