Prediction of the critical temperature of a superconductor by using the WOA/MARS, Ridge, Lasso and Elastic-net machine learning techniques

Abstract

This study builds a predictive model capable of estimating the critical temperature of a superconductor from experimentally determined physico-chemical properties of the material (input variables): features extracted from the thermal conductivity, atomic radius, valence, electron affinity and atomic mass. This original model is built using a novel hybrid algorithm relied on the multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) technique in combination with a nature-inspired meta-heuristic optimization algorithm termed the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) that mimics the social behavior of humpback whales. Additionally, the Ridge, Lasso and Elastic-net regression models were fitted to the same experimental data for comparison purposes. The results of the current investigation indicate that the critical temperature of a superconductor can be successfully predicted using this proposed hybrid WOA/MARS-based model. Furthermore, the results obtained with the Ridge, Lasso and Elastic-net regression models are clearly worse than those obtained with the WOA/MARS-based model.