Comparative Analysis of Support Vector Machine Regression and Gaussian Process Regression in Modeling Hydrogen Production from Waste Effluent

Organic-rich substrates from organic waste effluents are ideal sources for hydrogen production based on the circular economy concept. In this study, a data-driven approach was employed in modeling hydrogen production from palm oil mill effluents and activated sludge waste. Seven models built on support vector machine (SVM) and Gaussian process regression (GPR) were employed for the modeling of the hydrogen production from the waste sources. The SVM was incorporated with linear kernel function (LSVM), quadratic kernel function (QSVM), cubic kernel function (CSVM), and Gaussian fine kernel function (GFSVM). While the GPR was incorporated with the rotational quadratic kernel function (RQGPR), squared exponential kernel function (SEGPR), and exponential kernel function (EGPR). The model performance revealed that the SVM-based models did not show impressive performance in modeling the hydrogen production from the palm oil mill effluent, as indicated by the R² of −0.01, 0.150, and 0.143 for LSVM, QSVM, and CSVM, respectively. Similarly, the SVM-based models did not perform well in modeling the hydrogen production from activated sludge, as evidenced by R² values of 0.040, 0.190, and 0.340 for LSVM, QSVM, and CSVM, respectively. On the contrary, the SEGPR, RQGPR, SEGPR, and EGPR models displayed outstanding performance in modeling the prediction of hydrogen production from both oil palm mill effluent and activated sludge, with over 90% of the datasets explaining the variation in the model output. With the R² > 0.9, the predicted hydrogen production was consistent with the SEGPR, RQGPR, SEGPR, and EGPR with minimized prediction errors. The level of importance analysis revealed that all the input parameters are relevant in the production of hydrogen. How-ever, the influent chemical oxygen demand (COD) concentration and the medium temperature significantly influenced the hydrogen production from palm oil mill effluent, whereas the pH of the medium and the temperature significantly influenced the hydrogen production from the activated sludge.