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Uncertainty-Aware Bayesian Machine Learning for Thermo-Kinetic Parameter Estimation from Noisy Temperature Profiles

delete2026-08-11
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M
Mark Korang Yeboah *
N
Nana Yaw Asiedu
DOI:10.3390/make8080235delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Temperature–time profiles obtained through thermistor-based monitoring provide a rich but noise-sensitive source of information for estimating kinetic and thermal parameters in exothermic batch reactions. Conventional workflows typically combine deterministic smoothing with numerical differentiation, an approach that can amplify measurement noise and fail to propagate preprocessing uncertainty into the resulting reaction-rate and parameter estimates. To address these limitations, this study presents an uncertainty-aware Bayesian machine-learning framework that integrates scalable random-Fourier-feature Gaussian-process (RFF–GP) smoothing, analytical differentiation, temperature-derived apparent conversion, Bayesian parameter inference, posterior validation, predictive calibration, model comparison, ablation, sensitivity analysis, probabilistic benchmarking, simulation of thermal nonideality, and endpoint diagnostics. The framework was applied to 379,631 cleaned thermistor observations. The production RFF–GP achieved a validation root-mean-square error of 0.04805K, yielding a stable latent temperature trajectory and an uncertainty-aware estimate of dT/dt. On a smaller matched subset, exact Gaussian-process regression achieved the highest predictive accuracy and the best probabilistic scores, whereas the RFF–GP reduced central-processing-unit runtime by approximately 4.1-fold and remained applicable to the larger production fit. A Monte Carlo dropout neural comparator produced larger prediction errors and substantially wider predictive intervals. Six apparent thermokinetic structures were evaluated using mean-field variational inference, after which the nth-order and autocatalytic structures were validated using the No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS). Under mean-field variational inference, the apparent autocatalytic structure achieved the lowest point estimate of the widely applicable information criterion (WAIC), the lowest derivative-domain error, and the lowest full-profile temperature-reconstruction root-mean-square error of 0.2920K. Its posterior obtained using NUTS yielded Ea=40.98kJmol−1, kref=0.005815min−1, ΔTad=56.11K, m=0.1694, and n=1.0784. The sampling diagnostics indicated satisfactory convergence, large effective sample sizes, and no divergent transitions. Although the MFVI posterior means and NUTS posterior medians were similar, variational inference produced narrower uncertainty intervals for several correlated parameters. Moving-block bootstrap intervals did not establish a decisive separation in WAIC among the leading structures. Expanded sensitivity, ablation, imperfect-insulation simulation, and endpoint-holdout analyses further showed that the apparent parameter estimates were sensitive to optimization, thermal nonideality, sensor response, and Gaussian-process boundary behavior. The autocatalytic formulation should therefore be interpreted as the best-performing apparent structure among the candidates tested rather than as evidence of a unique chemical mechanism. Overall, the framework extracted physically plausible apparent thermokinetic information from noisy temperature-only measurements while explicitly quantifying uncertainty arising from prediction, parameter estimation, model form, computation, thermal nonideality, and boundary behavior.
Keywords:
Bayesian machine learning
random Fourier feature Gaussian processes
uncertainty quantification
apparent thermokinetic parameter estimation
posterior predictive calibration
No-U-Turn Sampler
mean-field variational inference
reaction calorimetry
temperature-only measurements
exothermic batch reactions

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Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction
IF:
6
Papers:
772
Citations:
1.8K

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university of duisburg-essen
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1.4K
Papers: 520
Citations: 1
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kwame nkrumah university of science and technology
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Papers: 198
Citations: 0
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