Modeling of steelmaking process with effective machine learning techniques

Monitoring and control of the output yield of steel in a steelmaking shop plays a critical role in steel industry. The yield of steel determines how much percentage of hot metal, scrap, and iron ore are being converted into steel ingots. It represents the operational efficiency of the steelmaking shop and is considered as an important performance measure for producing a specific quantity of steel. Due to complexity of the steelmaking process and nonlinear relationship between the process parameters, modeling the input-output process parameters and accurately predicting the output yield in the steelmaking shop is very difficult and has been a major research issue. Statistical models and artificial neural networks (ANN) have been extensively studied by researchers and practitioners to model a variety of complex processes. In the present study, we consider random forests (RF), ANN, dynamic evolving neuro-fuzzy inference system (DENFIS) and support vector regression (SVR) as competitive learning tools to verify the suitability of applications of these approaches and investigate their comparative predictive ability. In the present investigation, 0.00001 of MSE is set as a goal of learning during modeling. Based on real-life data, the computational results depict that the training and testing MSE values of SVR and DENFIS are close to 0.00001 indicating that they have higher prediction ability than ANN and RF. Also, mean absolute percentage prediction errors of the proposed models confirm that the predicted yield based on each method is in good agreement with the testing datasets. Overall, SVR performs best and DENFIS the next best followed by ANN and RF methods respectively. The results suggest that the prediction precision given by SVR can meet the requirement for the actual production of steel. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.