Comparative analysis of classical and ensemble models for predicting whole body vibration induced lumbar spine stress. A case study of agricultural tractor operators
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Accurate prediction of lumbar health is necessary for developing effective ergonomic strategies for tractor operators exposed to whole-body vibration. This study aims to predict static compression dose (S ed ), a key measure of lumbar spine stress as per ISO 2631-5, by comparing classical regression and ensemble models. Three tractor operation parameters (average speed, average depth, and pulling force) are considered to assess S ed during rotary tillage operation. The performance of two classical models (Linear and Huber regression) is compared with five ensemble models (Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost, AdaBoost, and Bagging regressors) in predicting S ed . The comparison identifies the best models in each category, with linear regression achieving a mean bootstrap R 2 of 0.91 (95 % CI: 0.87 to 0.94) and Random Forest achieving 0.93 (95 % CI: 0.90 to 0.95). To further enhance performance, meta-models are developed using two meta-learners (Random Forest and Gradient Boosting) to integrate classical and ensemble models. These models are optimized using different ensemble strategies: simple averaging, weighted averaging, stacking, and voting regressors. Among these, the stacking method proves most effective, achieving a mean bootstrap R 2 of 0.94 (95 % CI: 0.93 to 0.96). Feature importance analysis reveals that the multi-model combination of ensemble models achieves the highest predictive score (0.99) for S ed . These findings demonstrate that ensemble models outperform classical models in predicting Sed, particularly when combined through stacking methods. This advancement has significant implications for improving occupational health and safety among tractor operators, potentially leading to better ergonomic tractor designs aimed at reducing lumbar spine stress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".