An approach for the aging process optimization of Al–Zn–Mg–Cu series alloys

A new model based on least square support vector machines (LSSVM) and capable of forecasting mechanical and electrical properties of Al–Zn–Mg–Cu series alloys has been proposed for the first time. Data mining and artificial intelligence techniques of aluminum alloys are used to examine the forecasting capability of the model. In order to improve predictive accuracy and generalization ability of LSSVM model, a grid algorithm and cross-validation technique has been adopted to determine the optimal hyper-parameters of LSSVM automatically. The forecasting performance of the LSSVM model and the artificial neural network (ANN) has been compared with the experimental values. The result shows that the LSSVM model provides slightly better capability of generalized prediction compared to back propagation network (BPN) in combination with the gradient descent training algorithm. Considering its advantages of the computation speed, unique optimal solution, and generalization performance, the LSSVM model is therefore considered to be used as an alternative powerful modeling tool for the aging process optimization of aluminum alloys. Furthermore, a novel methodology hybridizing nondominated sorting-based multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) and LSSVM has been proposed to make tradeoffs between the mechanical and electrical properties. A desirable nondominated solution set has been obtained and reported.