PREDICTION OF RESPONSES IN A CNC MILLING OPERATION USING RANDOM FOREST REGRESSOR

Abstract

In the present-day manufacturing environment, the modeling of a machining process with the help of statistical and machine learning techniques in order to understand the material removal mechanism and study the influences of the input parameters on the responses has become essential for cost optimization and effective resource utilization. In this paper, using a past CNC face milling dataset with 27 experimental observations, a random forest (RF) regressor is employed to effectively predict the response values of the said process for given sets of input parameters. The considered milling dataset consists of four input parameters, i.e. cutting speed, feed rate, depth of cut and width of cut, and three responses, i.e. material removal rate, surface roughness and active energy consumption. The RF regressor is an ensemble learning method where multiple decision trees are combined together to provide better prediction results with minimum variance and overfitting of data. Its prediction performance is validated using five statistical metrics, i.e. mean absolute percentage error, root mean squared percentage error, root mean squared logarithmic error, correlation coefficient and root relative squared error. It is observed that the RF regressor can be deployed as an effective prediction tool with minimum feature selection for any of the machining processes.