The purpose of this study is to experimentally design the drying, calcination, and sintering processes of artificial lightweight aggregates through the orthogonal array, to expand the data using the results, and to model the manufacturing process of lightweight aggregates through machine-learning techniques. The experimental design of the process consisted of L18(3661), which means that 36 × 61 data can be obtained in 18 experiments using an orthogonal array design. After the experiment, the data were expanded to 486 instances and trained by several machine-learning techniques such as linear regression, random forest, and support vector regression (SVR). We evaluated the predictive performance of machine-learning models by comparing predicted and actual values. As a result, the SVR showed the best performance for predicting measured values. This model also worked well for predictions of untested cases.
Keywords: lightweight aggregate; machine learning; orthogonal array experiment design method; sintering process; support vector regression.