Doctoral Degrees (Chemical Engineering)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/323

Browse

Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Chemical Engineering) by Author "Auret, Lidia"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Process monitoring and fault diagnosis using random forests
    (Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2010-12) Auret, Lidia; Aldrich, C.; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Process Engineering.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Fault diagnosis is an important component of process monitoring, relevant in the greater context of developing safer, cleaner and more cost efficient processes. Data-driven unsupervised (or feature extractive) approaches to fault diagnosis exploit the many measurements available on modern plants. Certain current unsupervised approaches are hampered by their linearity assumptions, motivating the investigation of nonlinear methods. The diversity of data structures also motivates the investigation of novel feature extraction methodologies in process monitoring. Random forests are recently proposed statistical inference tools, deriving their predictive accuracy from the nonlinear nature of their constituent decision tree members and the power of ensembles. Random forest committees provide more than just predictions; model information on data proximities can be exploited to provide random forest features. Variable importance measures show which variables are closely associated with a chosen response variable, while partial dependencies indicate the relation of important variables to said response variable. The purpose of this study was therefore to investigate the feasibility of a new unsupervised method based on random forests as a potentially viable contender in the process monitoring statistical tool family. The hypothesis investigated was that unsupervised process monitoring and fault diagnosis can be improved by using features extracted from data with random forests, with further interpretation of fault conditions aided by random forest tools. The experimental results presented in this work support this hypothesis. An initial study was performed to assess the quality of random forest features. Random forest features were shown to be generally difficult to interpret in terms of geometry present in the original variable space. Random forest mapping and demapping models were shown to be very accurate on training data, and to extrapolate weakly to unseen data that do not fall within regions populated by training data. Random forest feature extraction was applied to unsupervised fault diagnosis for process data, and compared to linear and nonlinear methods. Random forest results were comparable to existing techniques, with the majority of random forest detections due to variable reconstruction errors. Further investigation revealed that the residual detection success of random forests originates from the constrained responses and poor generalization artifacts of decision trees. Random forest variable importance measures and partial dependencies were incorporated in a visualization tool to allow for the interpretation of fault conditions. A dynamic change point detection application with random forests proved more successful than an existing principal component analysis-based approach, with the success of the random forest method again residing in reconstruction errors. The addition of random forest fault diagnosis and change point detection algorithms to a suite of abnormal event detection techniques is recommended. The distance-to-model diagnostic based on random forest mapping and demapping proved successful in this work, and the theoretical understanding gained supports the application of this method to further data sets.