Study on Beamforming of Conformal Array Antenna Using Support Vector Regression

In this paper, we propose a new beamforming algorithm for a conformal array antenna based on support vector regression(SVR). While the conventional least squares method(LSM) considers all sample errors, SVR considers errors beyond the given error bound to obtain the optimum weight vector, which has a sparse solution and the advantage of the minimization of the overfitting problem. To verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, we apply SVR to the experimentally measured active element patterns of the conformal array antenna and obtain the weights for beamforming. In addition, we compare the beamforming results of SVR and LSM.