Mold Level Predict of Continuous Casting Using Hybrid EMD-SVR-GA Algorithm

The prediction of mold level is a basic and key problem of continuous casting production control. Many current techniques fail to predict the mold level because of mold level is non-linear, non-stationary and does not have a normal distribution. A hybrid model, based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and support vector regression (SVR), is proposed to solve the mold level in this paper. Firstly, the EMD algorithm, with adaptive decomposition, is used to decompose the original mold level signal to many intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Then, the SVR model optimized by genetic algorithm (GA) is used to predict the IMFs and residual sequences. Finally, the equalization of the predict results is reconstructed to obtain the predict result. Several hybrid predicting methods such as EMD and autoregressive moving average model (ARMA), EMD and SVR, wavelet transform (WT) and ARMA, WT and SVR are discussed and compared in this paper. These methods are applied to mold level prediction, the experimental results show that the proposed hybrid method based on EMD and SVR is a powerful tool for solving complex time series prediction. In view of the excellent generalization ability of the EMD, it is believed that the hybrid algorithm of EMD and SVR is the best model for mold level predict among the six methods, providing a new idea for guiding continuous casting process improvement.