Forecasting of Wood Moisture Content Based on Modified Ant Colony Algorithm to Optimize LSSVM Parameters

Wood moisture content (WMC) is an important technical index used in the wood drying process, and assessing its change accurately and reliably is the key to improving wood drying quality. In order to improve the accuracy and reliability of WMC forecasting, a modeling method is proposed that uses a modified ant colony algorithm (MACA) to optimize the least square support vector machine (LSSVM). The MACA combines the large-step size global search with the small-step size local fine search to obtain the optimal parameter combination automatically and are tested by five standard functions. Then the MACA-LSSVM model is proposed to predict the WMC and compared with back propagation neural network (BP-NN), LSSVM model, and ant colony optimization LSSVM (ACO-LSSVM). The drying data from a small-sized wood drying kiln independently developed by Northeast Forestry University are taken as the samples for analyzing. The results indicate that the root mean square relative error (RMSRE) obtained by the proposed method (MACA-LSSVM) is only 1.82%, which is 0.77%, 0.50%, and 0.20% less than those of the BP-NN, LSSVM, and ACO-LSSVM models. The forecasting time are 0.0070 s, 0.0030 s, and 0.0010 s shorter, respectively. The relative error (RE) and the mean absolute error (MAE) are also lower than those of the latter three models. The MACA-LSSVM shows the characteristics of low computational complexity, fast convergence speed, high prediction accuracy and strong generalization ability, and the prediction effect is ideal. This model can provide the theoretical support for intelligent control of the wood drying process.