Scarce Data in Intelligent Technical Systems: Causes, Characteristics, and Implications

Technical systems generate an increasing amount of data as integrated sensors become more available. Even so, data are still often scarce because of technical limitations of sensors, an expensive labelling process, or rare concepts, such as machine faults, which are hard to capture. Data scarcity leads to incomplete information about a concept of interest. This contribution details causes and effects of scarce data in technical systems. To this end, a typology is introduced which defines different types of incompleteness. Based on this, machine learning and information fusion methods are presented and discussed that are specifically designed to deal with scarce data. The paper closes with a motivation and a call for further research efforts into a combination of machine learning and information fusion.