A novel systematically optimized tabular neural network (TabNet) algorithm for predicting the tensile modulus of additively manufactured PLA parts

Assessing the elastic modulus of 3D-printed polylactic acid (PLA) components is essential for understanding their stiffness and load capacity, which are crucial for predicting product performance and durability. In this study, the predictive accuracy of a Tabular Neural Network (TabNet) algorithm for determining the elastic modulus of 3D-printed PLA components via fused deposition modeling (FDM) was investigated. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset of 128 literature-sourced data points, divided into 80 % for training and 20 % for validation, the study proposed a new Taguchi-based method for efficient hyperparameter optimization of the TabNet algorithm. This optimization revealed that a configuration of 8 decision blocks, 16 attention blocks, and 5 decision steps, along with the "Adam" optimizer, a gamma of 1, learning rate of 0.1, and lambda-sparse of 0.01, yielded the highest prediction accuracy for the elastic modulus of PLA parts. The performance of the optimized TabNet model was evaluated using R-squared (R-2), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) measures. The findings highlighted an R-2 of 96.855 %, an MAE of 0.158, an MSE of 0.037, and an RMSE of 0.193 in the validation dataset, demonstrating substantial predictive reliability. To further test the model's robustness, fourteen unseen data points were analyzed. The observed discrepancies between predicted and actual values were under 10 %, affirming the Taguchi-optimized TabNet algorithm's effectiveness in forecasting the elastic modulus of FDM 3D-printed PLA components. This investigation provides a significant advancement in additive manufacturing, introducing a precise and reliable method for predicting the mechanical properties of 3D-printed materials.