MACHINE LEARNING-BASED CLASSIFICATION OF SPACE TRAVEL ELIGIBILITY USING SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE, RANDOM FOREST, AND XGBOOST

Abstract

This study applies machine learning classification techniques to predict passenger displacement events based on corrupted data retrieved from a hypothetical interstellar spacecraft mission. Using a cleaned and preprocessed dataset containing demographic, behavioral, and exposure-related features, we compare the performance of three classification models: Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and XGBoost. Each model is trained on 80% of the data and evaluated on the remaining 20% using precision, recall, f1-score, and accuracy metrics. The SVM model shows the most notable improvement after feature selection, achieving a balanced performance across metrics. Meanwhile, Random Forest and XGBoost models maintain consistent and robust accuracy above 80% on both training and testing sets. Feature importance analysis also supports the interpretability of the models, particularly in Random Forest and XGBoost. The comparative analysis demonstrates that ensemble-based methods such as Random Forest and XGBoost are more effective in handling the complexity of the dataset, making them suitable for predictive tasks in high-dimensional, partially incomplete data scenarios.