Uncertainty-Aware Training and Computational Scaling for Hybrid Neural Pipeline Models: Heteroscedastic Loss Functions, Mixed Precision, and Multi-GPU Optimisation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64348/zije.2026442Abstract
The deployment of hybrid neural-statistical frameworks for pipeline Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction at operational scale requires both a principled training objective that produces calibrated uncertainty estimates and computational optimisation strategies that make training tractable on large-scale pipeline networks. Standard mean squared error (MSE) loss treats all predictions symmetrically, disregarding the heteroscedastic nature of pipeline degradation uncertainty: predictions for young, well-instrumented segments in low-risk environments carry substantially less uncertainty than those for ageing segments in data-sparse, high-corrosion zones. This paper develops and validates the heteroscedastic negative log-likelihood (NLL) loss function for pipeline RUL training, demonstrating that it simultaneously improves prediction accuracy and yields well-calibrated uncertainty estimates relative to standard MSE. Applied to the Nigerian pipeline dataset comprising 500 segments over 21 years, heteroscedastic NLL training reduces root mean squared error (RMSE) from a mean of 36.3 to 32.5 days, reduces mean absolute error (MAE) from 28.9 to 25.7 days, and improves R² from 0.846 to 0.863 across all four neural architectures, whilst improving prediction interval calibration by 5.6 percentage points relative to MSE training. Three computational optimisation strategies are evaluated: gradient checkpointing, which reduces GPU memory consumption by approximately 61.2%; mixed precision training (FP16 forward pass, FP32 gradient accumulation), which halves memory requirements and accelerates training by approximately 1.5× on compatible hardware; and multi-GPU data-parallel training, which distributes computation across N GPUs with theoretical speedup S = M/N. Together, these strategies reduce total training time from 72.4 hours to 18.2 hours (a 74.9% reduction) and GPU memory requirements from 48.3 GB to 9.4 GB per GPU (an 80.5% reduction), making the full four-architecture hybrid framework deployable at the scale of Nigeria's 7,000-kilometre pipeline network on workstation-class hardware. The findings demonstrate that principled uncertainty quantification and computational efficiency can be achieved jointly without sacrificing predictive performance.
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