Prediction of thermal conductivity of polymer-based composites by using support vector regression

Support vector regression (SVR) combined with particle swarm optimization (PSO) for its parameter optimization, was proposed to establish a model to predict the thermal conductivity of polymer-based composites under different mass fractions of fillers (mass fraction of polyethylene (PE) and mass fraction of polystyrene (PS)). The prediction performance of SVR was compared with those of other two theoretical models of spherical packing and flake packing. The result demonstrated that the estimated errors by leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV) test of SVR models, such as mean absolute error (MAE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), all are smaller than those achieved by the two theoretical models via applying identical samples. It is revealed that the generalization ability of SVR model is superior to those of the two theoretical models. This study suggests that SVR can be used as a powerful approach to foresee the thermal property of polymer-based composites under different mass fractions of polyethylene and polystyrene fillers.