Modelling and Prediction of Injection Molding Process Using Copula Entropy and Multi-Output SVR

Optimization and parameter adjustment of an injection molding (IM) process depend largely on a good modelling and prediction of industrial process, which has been received considerable attention in recent years. However, IM process is a typical multivariate production process with multiple product quality indices. It poses a great challenge for multi-output quality prediction problem to select key process variables as input with good interpretability. This study proposes a multivariate quality prediction method for IM process using copula entropy (CE) and multi-output support vector regression (MSVR). First, copula entropy is employed to characterize the association relationships between each process variable and the set of quality indices, thus key process variables can be selected by ranking CE. Then, the quantitative relationship between key process variables and quality indices is established by MSVR. Finally, the proposed method is tested by the experiment on a real IM process dataset. This study will provide an important reference for modelling and prediction of IM process and other multi-output problems.