MSA-Net: A Precise and Robust Model for Predicting the Carbon Content on an As-Received Basis of Coal

The carbon content as received (C) of coal is essential for the emission factor method in IPCC methodology. The traditional carbon measurement mechanism relies on detection equipment, resulting in significant detection costs. To reduce detection costs and provide precise predictions of Cs even in the absence of measurements, this paper proposes a neural network combining MLP with an attention mechanism (MSA-Net). In this model, the Attention Module is proposed to extract important and potential features. The Skip-Connections are utilized for feature reuse. The Huber loss is used to reduce the error between predicted C values and actual values. The experimental results show that when the input includes eight measured parameters, the MAPE of MSA-Net is only 0.83%, which is better than the state-of-the-art Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) method. MSA-Net exhibits better predictive performance compared to MLP, RNN, LSTM, and Transformer. Moreover, this article provides two measurement solutions for thermal power enterprises to reduce detection costs.