Effect of Artificial Neural Network Design Parameters for Prediction of PS/TiO₂ Nanofiber Diameter

In this study, polystyrene (PS) and PS/TiO₂ nanofibers were fabricated through electrospinning and quantitatively characterized to analyze and predict fiber diameters. To advance predictive methodologies for materials design, artificial neural network (ANN) models based on multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) architectures were developed using system- and process-level parameters as inputs and the fiber diameter as the output. Two data classes were constructed: Class 1, consisting of PS/TiO₂ nanofibers, and Class 2, containing both PS and PS/TiO₂ nanofibers. The architectural optimization of the ANN models, particularly the number of neurons in hidden layers, had a critical influence on the correlation between predicted and experimentally measured fiber diameters. The optimal MLP configuration employed 40 and 20 neurons in the hidden layers, achieving mean square errors (MSEs) of 4.03 × 10^-3 (Class 1) and 7.01 × 10^-3 (Class 2). The RBF model reached its highest accuracy with 30 and 250 neurons, yielding substantially lower MSE values of 1.42 × 10^-32 and 2.75 × 10^-32 for Class 1 and Class 2, respectively. These findings underline the importance of methodological rigor in data-driven modeling and demonstrate that carefully optimized ANN frameworks can serve as powerful tools for predicting structural features in nanostructured materials, thereby supporting rational materials design and synthesis.