A wrapper approach-based key temperature point selection and thermal error modeling method

A wrapper approach-based key temperature point selection and thermal error modeling method is proposed to concurrently screen the optimal key temperature points and construct the thermal error model. This wrapper approach can strengthen the intrinsic relation between the key temperature points and the thermal error model to ensure the strong prediction performance. On the whole, the least squares support vector machine (SVM) is used as the basic thermal error modeling method and the binary bat algorithm (BBA) is used as the optimization algorithm. The selection status of temperature points and the values of hyperparameters γ and σ² of SVM are coded in separate binary parts of the artificial bat’s position vector of BBA. The cost function is designed by balancing the prediction error and the number of key temperature points. For verification, the thermal error experiment was conducted on a horizontal machining center. Feeding the collected experimental temperature data and thermal error data to the proposed method, three optimal key temperature points were screened out and the corresponding optimal hyperparameters were simultaneously searched. To verify the superiority of the proposed method, the prediction performance comparison analysis was conducted with the conventional filter-based method. Specifically, in the conventional method, the key temperature points were screened by combining fuzzy c means (FCM) clustering and correlation analysis, and the multiple linear regression (MLR), the backpropagation neural network (BPNN), and the SVM were used to build the thermal error model, respectively. Comparison results showed that the prediction accuracy of the proposed method increased by up to 44.0% compared to the conventional method, which suggests the superior prediction performance of the proposed method.