An Enhanced Stacking Ensemble Method for Granule Moisture Prediction in Fluidized Bed Granulation

Moisture is a crucial quality property for granules in fluidized bed granulation (FBG) and accurate prediction of the granule moisture is significant for decision making. This study proposed a novel stacking ensemble method to predict the granule moisture based on granulation process parameters. The proposed method employed k-nearest neighbor (KNN), random forest (RF), light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM) and deep neural networks (DNNs) as the base learners, and ridge regression (RR) as the meta learner. To improve the diversity of the base learners, perturbations of the input variables and network structures were adopted in the proposed method, implemented by feature construction and combination of multiple DNNs with a different number of hidden layers, respectively. In the feature construction, a SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) approach was innovatively utilized to construct effective synthetic features, which enhanced the prediction performance of the base learners. The cross-validation results demonstrated that the proposed stacking ensemble method outperformed other machine learning (ML) algorithms in terms of performance evaluation criteria, for which the parameters MAE, MAPE, RMSE, and Adj. R-2 were 0.0596, 1.5819, 0.0844, and 0.99485, respectively.