Introducing Machine Learning Models to Response Surface Methodologies

Traditional response surface methodology (RSM) has utilized the ordinary least squared (OLS) technique to numerically estimate the coefficients for multiple influence factors to achieve the values of the responsive factor while considering the intersection and quadratic terms of the influencers if any. With the emergence and popularization of machine learning (ML), more competitive methods has been developed which can be adopted to complement or replace the tradition RSM method, i.e. the OLS with or without the polynomial terms. In this chapter, several commonly used regression models in the ML including the improved linear models (the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator model and the generalized linear model), the decision trees family (decision trees, random forests and gradient boosting trees), the model of the neural nets, (the multi-layer perceptrons) and the support vector machine will be introduced. Those ML models will provide a more flexible way to estimate the response surface function that is difficult to be represented by a polynomial as deployed in the traditional RSM. The advantage of the ML models in predicting precise response factor values is then demonstrated by implementation on an engineering case study. The case study has shown that the various choices of the ML models can reach a more satisfactory estimation for the responsive surface function in comparison to the RSM. The GDBT has exhibited to outperform the RSM with an accuracy improvement for 50% on unseen experimental data.