Anomaly Detection for Wind Turbines Using Long Short-Term Memory-Based Variational Autoencoder Wasserstein Generation Adversarial Network under Semi-Supervised Training

Abstract

Intelligent anomaly detection for wind turbines using deep-learning methods has been extensively researched and yielded significant results. However, supervised learning necessitates sufficient labeled data to establish the discriminant boundary, while unsupervised learning lacks prior knowledge and heavily relies on assumptions about the distribution of anomalies. A long short-term memory-based variational autoencoder Wasserstein generation adversarial network (LSTM-based VAE-WGAN) was established in this paper to address the challenge of small and noisy wind turbine datasets. The VAE was utilized as the generator, with LSTM units replacing hidden layer neurons to effectively extract spatiotemporal factors. The similarity between the model-fit distribution and true distribution was quantified using Wasserstein distance, enabling complex high-dimensional data distributions to be learned. To enhance the performance and robustness of the proposed model, a two-stage adversarial semi-supervised training approach was implemented. Subsequently, a monitoring indicator based on reconstruction error was defined, with the threshold set at a 99.7% confidence interval for the distribution curve fitted by kernel density estimation (KDE). Real cases from a wind farm in northeast China have confirmed the feasibility and advancement of the proposed model, while also discussing the effects of various applied parameters.