Ensemble approach to prediction of initial velocity centered around random forest regression and feed forward deep neural networks

Abstract: Prediction of initial velocity of artillery system is a feature that is hard to determine with statistical and analytical models. Machine learning is therefore to be tested, in order to achieve a higher accuracy than the current method (baseline). An ensemble approach will be explored in this paper, centered around feed forward deep neural network and random forest regression. Furthermore, collinearity of features and their importance will be investigated. The impact of the measured error on the range of the projectile will also be derived by finding a numerical solution with Newton Raphsons method. For the five systemstest data was used on, the mean absolute errors were 26, 9.33, 8.72 and 9.06 for deep neural networks,random forest regression, ensemble learning and conventional method, respectively. For future works,more models should be tested with ensemble learning, as well as investigation on the feature space for the input data.