Marine steel corrosion prediction and zonation using feature extraction and machine learning in the seas around China

To reduce the losses caused by the marine corrosion of steel, it is important to establish a prediction model to determine the corrosion rate of steel in depth-varying aggressive marine environments. The use of statistical feature extraction methods and machine learning modeling for marine steel corrosion prediction and zoning in the seas around China is investigated. In this study, 856 samples were collected. Mean and standard deviation were selected as environmental characteristics and corrosion loss time-varying relationships were log-transformed. Subsequently, four main supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms including Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting (GB), and XGBoost were explored for predicting corrosion loss in different depth-varying marine exposure zones. The GB model showed the best prediction accuracy and generalization ability with MSE, RMSE, MAE, and R2 values of 0.08, 0.43, 0.19, and 0.92, respectively. The spatial and temporal distribution of corrosion loss and zoning map in the seas around China were obtained. According to the corrosion zoning map of the splash zone, the South China Sea has a higher degree of corrosion, particularly in its northwestern region.