Sensitivity enhancing transformations for monitoring the process correlation structure

Abstract

In this article we address the general problem of monitoring the process cross- and auto-correlation structure through the incorporation of information about its internal structure in a pre-processing stage, where sensitivity enhancing transformations are applied to collected data. We have found out that the sensitivity of the monitoring statistics based on partial or marginal correlations in detecting structural changes is directly related to the nominal levels of the correlation coefficients during normal operation conditions (NOC). The highest sensitivities are obtained when the process variables involved are uncorrelated, a situation that is hardly met in practice. However, not all transformations perform equally well in producing uncorrelated transformed variables with enhanced detection sensitivities. The most successful ones are based on the incorporation of the natural relationships connecting the process variables. In this context, a set of sensitivity enhancing transformations are proposed, which are based on a network reconstruction algorithm. These new transformations make use of fine structural information of the variables connectivity and therefore are able to improve the detection capability to local changes in correlation, leading to better performances when compared to current marginal-based methods, namely those based on latent variables models, such as PCA or PLS. Moreover, a novel monitoring statistic for the transformed variables variance proved to be very useful in the detection of structural changes resulting from model mismatch. This statistic allows for the detection of multiple structural changes within the same monitoring scheme and with higher detection performances when compared to the current methods.