Information enhanced slow feature analysis integrated with prior fault data for sensitive monitoring of chemical processes

As an effective feature extraction method, slow feature analysis (SFA) has been successfully applied in the domain of chemical process monitoring. However, as an unsupervised method, the basic SFA ignores the key information carried by prior fault data so that many complicated faults cannot be sensitively detected. To address this issue, an enhanced SFA method, termed Information Enhanced SFA (IE-SFA), is proposed by integrating available fault discriminant information to achieve more sensitive detection of complicated chemical process faults. The proposed method builds a primary-auxiliary SFA modeling framework. On the one hand, the normal training data are analyzed to establish the primary SFA model. On the other, prior fault data are integrated to develop an auxiliary monitoring model for providing extra fault-sensitive information. In the auxiliary model, a sample-variable weighted Fisher discriminant analysis method is performed on normal data, fault data, and their respective slow feature components, thereby extracting fault-sensitive features for enhancing the fault detection capability. For full-view fault monitoring, the Bayesian fusion strategy is used to fuse the outcomes from both primary and auxiliary models. The applications on a benchmark Tennessee Eastman chemical process and a three-phase flow process demonstrate that the proposed IE-SFA method provides superior fault detection performance compared to the basic SFA method.