A Novel Fault Detection Scheme Based on Mutual k-Nearest Neighbor Method: Application on the Industrial Processes with Outliers

Abstract

The k-nearest neighbor (kNN) method only uses samples’ paired distance to perform fault detection. It can overcome the nonlinearity, multimodality, and non-Gaussianity of process data. However, the nearest neighbors found by kNN on a data set containing a lot of outliers or noises may not be actual or trustworthy neighbors but a kind of pseudo neighbor, which will degrade process monitoring performance. This paper presents a new fault detection scheme using the mutual k-nearest neighbor (MkNN) method to solve this problem. The primary characteristic of our approach is that the calculation of the distance statistics for process monitoring uses MkNN rule instead of kNN. The advantage of the proposed approach is that the influence of outliers in the training data is eliminated, and the fault samples without MkNNs can be directly detected, which improves the performance of fault detection. In addition, the mutual protection phenomenon of outliers is explored. The numerical examples and Tenessee Eastman process illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.