A prior-knowledge input LSSVR metamodeling method with tuning based on cellular particle swarm optimization for engineering design

• A prior-knowledge input LSSVR (PKI-LSSVR) is proposed.
• In PKI-LSSVR, the low-fidelity knowledge is used as the input of LSSVR.
• CPSO is adopted with a new neighborhood function to tune the hyper-parameters.
• Case study shows PKI-LSSVR performs well in accuracy and robustness.

Engineering design is usually a daunting optimization task which often involving time-consuming, even computation-prohibitive process. To reduce the computational expense, metamodels are commonly used to replace the actual expensive simulations or experiments. In this paper, a new and efficient metamodeling method named prior-knowledge input least square support vector regression (PKI-LSSVR) is developed, in which samples from different levels of fidelity are incorporated to gain an accurate approximation with limited times of the high-fidelity (HF) expensive simulations. The low-fidelity (LF) output serves as a prior-knowledge of the real response function, and then is used as the input variables of least square support vector regression (LSSVR). When the corresponding HF response is gained, a function that maps the LF outputs to HF outputs is constructed via LSSVR. The predictive accuracy of LSSVR models is highly dependent on their learning parameters. Therefore, a novel optimization method, cellular particle swarm optimization (CPSO), is exploited to seek the optimal hyper-parameters for PKI-LSSVR in order to improve its generalization capability. To get a better optimization performance, a new neighborhood function is developed for CPSO where the global and local search is efficiently balanced by adaptively varied neighbor radius. Several numerical experiments and one engineering case verify the efficiency of the proposed PKI-LSSVR method. Sample quality merits including sample sizes and noise, and metamodel performance evaluation measures incorporating accuracy, robustness, and efficiency are considered.