| Summary: | The performance prediction of an optical communications link over maritime environments has been extensively researched over the last two decades. The various atmospheric phenomena and turbulence effects have been thoroughly explored, and long-term measurements have allowed for the construction of simple empirical models. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the prediction accuracy of various machine learning (ML) algorithms for a free-space optical communication (FSO) link performance, with respect to real time, non-linear atmospheric conditions. A large data set of received signal strength indicators (RSSI) for a laser communications link has been collected and analyzed against seven local atmospheric parameters (i.e., wind speed, pressure, temperature, humidity, dew point, solar flux and air-sea temperature difference). The k-nearest-neighbors (KNN), tree-based methods-decision trees, random forest and gradient boosting- and artificial neural networks (ANN) have been employed and compared among each other using the root mean square error (RMSE) and the coefficient of determination (R<sup>2</sup>) of each model as the primary performance indices. The regression analysis revealed an excellent fit for all ML models, indicative of their ability to offer a significant improvement in FSO performance modeling as compared to traditional regression models. The best-performing R<sup>2</sup> model found to be the ANN approach (0.94867), while random forests achieved the most optimal RMSE result (7.37).
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