Comparison of Performances of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models for Prediction of Creep Rupture Life

Muhammad Bilal Jan, Zengchao Wu, Mengyu Chai

Accurate prediction of creep rupture life is essential for ensuring the long-term reliability of high-temperature components in power generation and petrochemical industries. Selecting appropriate data-driven models for limited and heterogeneous creep datasets remains a critical challenge, as conventional accuracy-based comparisons do not fully capture model behavior under varying service conditions. This study presents a unified evaluation framework for systematically comparing multiple machine learning and deep learning models for creep rupture life prediction of 2.25Cr–1Mo steel. The framework integrates predictive accuracy, prediction reliability, regime-specific error analysis, and computational efficiency, enabling a comprehensive assessment beyond global error metrics. The input feature space is reduced from seventeen to eight physically meaningful variables without loss of predictive performance. To further assess model robustness, prediction errors are analyzed across four distinct rupture life regimes, revealing significant variations in model behavior that are not reflected in aggregate metrics. Results indicate that support vector regression (SVR) provides the most consistent overall performance across all regimes and offers a strong balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. Among deep learning models, a Bayesian neural network (BNN) achieves competitive predictive performance while additionally enabling uncertainty estimation. These findings demonstrate that, for small tabular creep datasets, appropriately regularized models outperform complex neural network architectures, highlighting the importance of matching model complexity to dataset characteristics. This study is limited to a single steel grade, moderate dataset size, and extrapolation beyond trained stress and temperature ranges, which are key directions for future work.