A novel soft computing method for engine RUL prediction

Prognostics is an engineering discipline focused on predicting the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a system or a component using raw multimedia (sensor) data. This paper presents a novel machine learning model for this task, which includes a smart ensemble of gradient boosted trees (GBT) and feed-forward neural networks. It incorporates discussions on the poor performance of MLPs and the need of ensemble models. Initial stages of data exploration and pre-processing are also comprehensively documented. Experiments are performed on the four run-to-failure C-MAPSS datasets defined by the 2008 PHM Data Challenge Competition. It concludes by presenting evaluations of multiple prediction models like MLP, SVR, CNN & gradient boosted trees (GBT). Gradient Boosted Trees are efficient in the sense that they produce an encouraging scoring model with minimum effort and also return feature importance information. The proposed method uses stacking ensemble of feed-forward neural networks and gradient boosted trees, as first level learner, and, a single-hidden layer- fully-connected neural network as the meta learner. This ensemble provides better results than any of the models alone or weighted average of their predictions. The proposed method outperforms MLP, SVR, CNN and GBT.