A Relevant Variable Selection and SVDD-Based Fault Detection Method for Process Monitoring

This study investigates the sample value imbalance problem of process monitoring. A fault detection approach based on variable selection and support vector data description (SVDD) is developed for efficient process monitoring. First, Kullback–Leibler divergence serves as the variable selection algorithm, which highlights the most beneficial information about the concerned faults. The attained variables are segmented by block division to avoid faults information being covered in single space monitoring, so that the relevant variables and the most beneficial information are concentrated in the same block. Then, Kernel principal component analysis is applied in each block to address the challenge that variables may still be high-dimensional and nonlinear. After that, the monitoring result is given based on the proposed SVDD with a restructured radius index, which is more sensitive to the fault. As demonstrated from experimental results on the Tennessee Eastman process, this method is effective and outperforms counterparts with higher mean fault detection rate. Note to Practitioners—Recently, multivariate statistical process monitoring (MSPM) has attracted much attention. In general, MSPM incorporates all variables for the large-scale process. However, only a small number of variables are fault-dependent. Namely, the sample value imbalance problem is encountered in application. In this scenario, the monitoring performance degrades and the online computational complexity increases. To this end, a SVDD-based fault detection method, which considers the fault-related variables, is proposed for process monitoring. The proposed method is verified by the Tennessee Eastman process and it is more sensitive to the concerned fault.