Fault detection in multimodal processes based on the local entropy double subspace

Recently, principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA) have attracted increasing attention for fault detection in industrial processes. However, industrial processes usually have multimodal characteristics, in which case, the performance of traditional PCA and ICA methods is poor. A fault detection method based on the local entropy double subspace (LEDS) is proposed that effectively supervises the multimodal process with multiple steady modes. The proposed method uses the local probability density (LPD) to eliminate the multimodal characteristics of the data. Furthermore, local entropy (LE) is applied to mine the statistical information associated with the process data. The process variables are classified into Gaussian and non-Gaussian subspaces by the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) test. PCA and ICA models are built in Gaussian and non-Gaussian subspaces, respectively, for fault detection. A Bayesian decision method is employed to transform the detection results into fault probabilities, and the detection results are combined with the final statistical information. This method effectively eliminates the multicentre structure of the data and improves the fault detection performance of traditional PCA and ICA. The proposed method is applied to the Tennessee Eastman multimodal process. The simulation results show that the fault detection rate of LEDS is better than the rates of traditional methods when the false alarm rate is low for most faults.