A Stacking-Enhanced Support Vector Regression Model for Predicting the Hot Deformation Flow Stress of TC18 Alloy

This study systematically investigates the hot deformation behavior of TC18 alloy under the conditions of deformation temperatures of 720–840 °C and strain rates of 0.001–1 s−1. Based on the stress–strain data obtained under the aforementioned process parameters, a support vector regression (SVR) model was established and further optimized by using a Stacking algorithm to enhance predictive accuracy. Although SVR and Stacking techniques have been applied previously in material constitutive modeling, this paper presents a systematic optimization framework specifically for TC18, integrating comprehensive experimental data, kernel selection, hyperparameter tuning, and Stacking-based model fusion. The polynomial kernel function was identified as optimal, and hyperparameters were tuned via grid search combined with five-fold cross-validation, which is determined as {C = 1000, coef0 = 1, d = 5, ε = 1, γ = 1}. The Stacking-SVR model exhibits significantly improved fitting and generalization performance compared to Poly-SVR, Arrhenius, XGBoost and MLP, with RMSE, MAPE, and R2 metrics of 2.7882, 0.0110, and 0.9973 on the training set, and 2.7956, 0.0169, and 0.9982 on the test set, respectively. Additionally, the proportion of samples with relative errors within 5% reaches 98.7% for the training set and 94.83% for the test set. These results indicate that the proposed framework not only possesses extremely high predictive accuracy, but also ensures strong generalization ability and interpretability in practical applications.