A Semisupervised Soft-Sensor of Just-in-Time Learning With Structure Entropy Clustering and Applications for Industrial Processes Monitoring

To monitor industrial processes properly, soft-sensors are widely used to predict significant but difficult-to-measure quality variables. However, the prediction performances of traditional data-driven soft-sensors are usually unacceptable once suffering from high-nonlinear, high-dimension, and imblance data issues. Therefore, a semisupervised soft-sensor, which is learned by a just-in-time method with structure entropy clustering (SS-JITL-SEC), is proposed aiming to improve prediction performance with a simpler way. Inspired by a divide and conquer strategy, a novel SEC method is proposed to achieve several clusters and then to translate the highly complex and nonlinear modeling problems into simple and linear ones. Moreover, the training dataset is extended through a mixed SS labeling approach. Finally, dissimilarity-based JITL works together with the resulting clustering subdatasets to formulate a local adaptive prediction model. Two datasets from different types of wastewater treatment plants are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed soft-sensor. The results show that the SS-JITL-SEC soft-sensor can achieve better prediction performance than other standard counterparts, and even for effective process monitoring with the resulted residuals.