Extreme Gradient Boosting Regressor Solution for Defy in Drilling of Materials

Abstract

Drilling is a quite common operation being performed in the manufacturing of components. Instrumental response in drilling is geometrical accuracy and surface integrity of the drilled parts. For the application where geometrical tolerance is very small, an operation is to be carried out very carefully. If not, rejection of drilled samples will be higher and consequently production loss will be higher. The use of prediction model in this scenario is much more appropriate and cost-effective. This research aimed to apply extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) regressor to develop a drilling prediction model. Drilling experiments were conducted after developing design of experiments with twenty-seven unique sets. Experimental data analysis was then carried out on experimental data sets that have features such as speed, feed, angle, hole length, and surface roughness. After correlation analysis, the k-fold cross validation method was applied for parameterisation. Hyperparameters estimated from the k-fold cross validation were then applied to train and test the XGBoost regressor-based machine learning (ML) model. It is concluded from the model evaluation metric (R2) that the XGBoost regressor model has resulted 0.89 before tuning and 0.94 after tuning of the model, which is higher than the polynomial regressor and support vector regressor.