Learning With Imbalanced Data in Smart Manufacturing: A Comparative Analysis

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is revolutionising the world of manufacturing into what is known as Smart Manufacturing or Industry 4.0. The main pillar in smart manufacturing looks at harnessing IoT data and leveraging machine learning (ML) to automate the prediction of faults, thus cutting maintenance time and cost and improving the product quality. However, faults in real industries are overwhelmingly outweighed by instances of good performance (faultless samples); this bias is reflected in the data captured by IoT devices. Imbalanced data limits the success of ML in predicting faults, thus presents a significant hindrance in the progress of smart manufacturing. Although various techniques have been proposed to tackle this challenge in general, this work is the first to present a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of these remedies in the context of manufacturing. We present a comprehensive comparative analysis in which we apply our proposed framework to benchmark the performance of different combinations of algorithm components using a real-world manufacturing dataset. We draw key insights into the effectiveness of each component and inter-relatedness between the dataset, the application context, and the design of the ML algorithm.