Automated machine learning for fabric quality prediction: a comparative analysis

The enhancement of fabric quality prediction in the textile manufacturing sector is achieved by utilizing information derived from sensors within the Internet of Things (IoT) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems linked to sensors embedded in textile machinery. The integration of Industry 4.0 concepts is instrumental in harnessing IoT sensor data, which, in turn, leads to improvements in productivity and reduced lead times in textile manufacturing processes. This study addresses the issue of imbalanced data pertaining to fabric quality within the textile manufacturing industry. It encompasses an evaluation of seven open-source automated machine learning (AutoML) technologies, namely FLAML (Fast Lightweight AutoML), AutoViML (Automatically Build Variant Interpretable ML models), EvalML (Evaluation Machine Learning), AutoGluon, H2OAutoML, PyCaret, and TPOT (Tree-based Pipeline Optimization Tool). The most suitable solutions are chosen for certain circumstances by employing an innovative approach that finds a compromise among computational efficiency and forecast accuracy. The results reveal that EvalML emerges as the top-performing AutoML model for a predetermined objective function, particularly excelling in terms of mean absolute error (MAE). On the other hand, even with longer inference periods, AutoGluon performs better than other methods in measures like mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), root mean squared error (RMSE), and r-squared. Additionally, the study explores the feature importance rankings provided by each AutoML model, shedding light on the attributes that significantly influence predictive outcomes. Notably, sin/cos encoding is found to be particularly effective in characterizing categorical variables with a large number of unique values. This study includes useful information about the application of AutoML in the textile industry and provides a roadmap for employing Industry 4.0 technologies to enhance fabric quality prediction. The research highlights the importance of striking a balance between predictive accuracy and computational efficiency, emphasizes the significance of feature importance for model interpretability, and lays the groundwork for future investigations in this field.