Black-box modeling of ship maneuvering motion using multi-output least-squares support vector regression based on optimal mixed kernel function

Black-box modeling has been widely used to predict ship maneuvering motion. A novel black-box modeling approach using optimal mixed kernel multi-output least-squares support vector regression (MMLSSVR) based on the artificial hummingbird algorithm (AHA) is proposed in this paper. To improve the performance of the MMLSSVR model, a mixed kernel function that combines a radial basis function and a polynomial kernel function to capture both global and local properties is proposed. The optimal hyper-parameters of the mixed kernel function are determined by the AHA, which employs the linear combination of the mean square error and the determinant of error covariance as the objective function to balance between prediction accuracy and stability. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using SR108 large container ship data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MMLSSVR model achieves desirable prediction accuracy and strong generalizability for ship maneuvering motion modeling.