Nowadays, the unconventional gas-bearing system plays an increasingly important role in energy market. The performances of the current history-matching techniques are not satisfied when applied to such systems. To overcome this shortfall, an alternative approach was developed and applied to investigate production data from an unconventional gas-bearing system. In this approach, the fluid flow curve obtained from the field is the superposition of a series of Gaussian functions. An automatic computing program was developed in the MATLAB, and both gas and water field data collected from a vertical well in the Linxing Block, Ordos Basin, were used to present the data processing technique. In the reservoir study, the automatic computing program was applied to match the production data from a single coal seam, multiple coal seams and multiple vertically stacked reservoirs with favourable fitting results. Compared with previous approaches, the proposed approach yields better results for both gas and water production data and can calculate the contributions from different reservoirs. The start time of the extraction for each gas-containing unit can also be determined. The new approach can be applied to the field data prediction and designation for the well locations and patterns at the reservoir scale.