Applications of multivariate statistics at Dofasco

Multivariate statistical technologies, the principal components analysis and projection to latent structures, are data modeling technologies based on advanced multivariable statistical methods. These methods are capable of: analyzing process data; building predictive models and providing SPC functionality by extracting information from all process and quality data from an operation simultaneously. Multivariate statistical methods are especially powerful techniques for analyzing industrial data sets that have the following characteristics: higher dimensionality; high collinearity; noisy; and with some missing data. The application of these methods have been successfully done at Dofasco since 1993 to analyze data for a variety of purposes, develop online predictive models, and develop online process monitoring systems. An online application is described to illustrate the advantages of this technology.