Fault Classification in Dynamic Processes Using Multiclass Relevance Vector Machine and Slow Feature Analysis

This paper proposes a modified relevance vector machine with slow feature analysis fault classification for industrial processes. Traditional support vector machine classification does not work well when there are insufficient training samples. A relevance vector machine, which is a Bayesian learning-based probabilistic sparse model, is developed to determine the probabilistic prediction and sparse solutions for the fault category. This approach has the benefits of good generalization ability and robustness to small training samples. To maximize the dynamic separability between classes and reduce the computational complexity, slow feature analysis is used to extract the inner dynamic features and reduce the dimension. Experiments comparing the proposed method, relevance vector machine and support vector machine classification are performed using the Tennessee Eastman process. For all faults, relevance vector machine has a classification rate of 39%, while the proposed algorithm has an overall classification rate of 76.1%. This shows the efficiency and advantages of the proposed method.