In reply to Ksharp.

Hi Ksharp,

I did not try a partial least squares model for this application. My main focus was to compare a GAM to a few more modern and more opaque machine learning models to demonstrate that GAMs strike a nice balance between accuracy and interpretability.

I do agree that a PLS model is good when you have correlated inputs and would be another reasonable model for comparison. Thanks for reading the article and thanks for your suggestion!

Best,

-Brian