Interpretable and extrapolation-stable model for predicting nanofluid thermal conductivity
摘要
Accurate prediction of nanofluid thermal conductivity is essential for the design of advanced thermal systems; however, existing approaches often face a trade-off between predictive accuracy and physical interpretability. In this study, a physics-guided hybrid modeling framework is proposed by integrating a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) with a Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) to address this limitation. The proposed methodology combines a spline-based GAM to capture global thermophysical trends with a regularized boosting model to learn localized nonlinear corrections. A comprehensive preprocessing pipeline is implemented, including feature engineering, Box-Cox transformation for variance stabilization, and a Random Forest-based outlier detection strategy. The hybrid model is evaluated against several state-of-the-art machine learning methods, including Random Forest, Support Vector Regression, Gaussian Processes, Neural Networks, and Decision Trees. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves high predictive accuracy (RMSE