Feature engineering in big data analytics for IoT-enabled smart manufacturing – Comparison between deep learning and statistical learning

Abstract

As IoT-enabled manufacturing is still in its infancy, there are several key research gaps that need to be addressed. These gaps include the understanding of the characteristics of the big data generated from industrial IoT sensors, the challenges they present to process data analytics, as well as the specific opportunities that the IoT big data could bring to advance manufacturing. In this paper, we use an inhouse-developed IoT-enabled manufacturing testbed to study the characteristics of the big data generated from the testbed. Since the quality of the data usually has the most impact on process modeling, data veracity is often the most challenging characteristic of big data. To address that, we explore the role of feature engineering in developing effective machine learning models for predicting key process variables. We compare complex deep learning approaches to a simple statistical learning approach, with different level or extent of feature engineering, to explore their pros and cons for potential industrial IoT-enabled manufacturing applications.