Einstein–Roscoe regression for the slag viscosity prediction problem in steelmaking

In classical machine learning, regressors are trained without attempting to gain insight into the mechanism connecting inputs and outputs. Natural sciences, however, are interested in finding a robust interpretable function for the target phenomenon, that can return predictions even outside of the training domains. This paper focuses on viscosity prediction problem in steelmaking, and proposes Einstein–Roscoe regression (ERR), which learns the coefficients of the Einstein–Roscoe equation, and is able to extrapolate to unseen domains. Besides, it is often the case in the natural sciences that some measurements are unavailable or expensive than the others due to physical constraints. To this end, we employ a transfer learning framework based on Gaussian process, which allows us to estimate the regression parameters using the auxiliary measurements available in a reasonable cost. In experiments using the viscosity measurements in high temperature slag suspension system, ERR is compared favorably with various machine learning approaches in interpolation settings, while outperformed all of them in extrapolation settings. Furthermore, after estimating parameters using the auxiliary dataset obtained at room temperature, an increase in accuracy is observed in the high temperature dataset, which corroborates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.