Non-judgemental Dynamic Fuel Cycle Benchmarking

Abstract: This paper presents a new fuel cycle benchmarking analysis methodology by coupling Gaussian process regression, a popular technique in Machine Learning, to dynamic time warping, a mechanism widely used in speech recognition. Together they generate figures-of-merit that are applicable to any time series metric that a benchmark may study. The figures-of-merit account for uncertainty in the metric itself, utilize information across the whole time domain, and do not require that the simulators use a common time grid. Here, a distance measure is defined that can be used to compare the performance of each simulator for a given metric. Additionally, a contribution measure is derived from the distance measure that can be used to rank order the importance of fuel cycle metrics. Lastly, this paper warns against using standard signal processing techniques for error reduction. This is because it is found that error reduction is better handled by the Gaussian process regression itself.