The results of internal cross-validation of 15 algorithms (Fig. ) demonstrated that the CatBoost (CATB) algorithm emerged as the most proficient in terms of R 2 . Particularly, CATB achieved an R 2 value of 0.792 ± 0.075, marking a statistically significant enhancement over its counterparts, as evidenced by the Wilcoxon signed-rank analysis (p < 0.01), illustrated in Fig. . Moreover, the CATB algorithm's effectiveness is further corroborated by negative RMSE and negative MAE values, recorded at -0.569 ± 0.099 and -0.307 ± 0.068, respectively. † 1.3