Tool wear negatively impacts the quality of workpieces produced by the drilling process. Accurate prediction of tool wear enables the operator to maintain the machine at the required level of performance. This research presents a novel hybrid machine learning approach for predicting the tool wear in a drilling process. The proposed approach is based on optimizing the extreme gradient boosting algorithm's hyperparameters by a spiral dynamic optimization algorithm (XGBoost-SDA). Simulations were

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... arried out on copper and cast-iron datasets with a high degree of accuracy. Further comparative analyses were performed with support vector machines (SVM) and multilayer perceptron artificial neural networks (MLP-ANN), where XGBoost-SDA showed superior performance with regard to the method. Simulations revealed that XGBoost-SDA results in the accurate prediction of flank wear in the drilling process with mean absolute error (MAE) = 4.67%, MAE = 5.32%, and coefficient of determination R2 = 0.9973 for the copper workpiece. Similarly, for the cast iron workpiece, XGBoost-SDA resulted in surface roughness predictions with MAE = 5.25%, root mean square error (RMSE) = 6.49%, and R2 = 0.975, which closely agree with the measured values. Performance comparisons between SVM, MLP-ANN, and XGBoost-SDA show that XGBoost-SDA is an effective method that can ensure high predictive accuracy about flank wear values in a drilling process.