Unsupervised Bayesian change-point detection approach for reliable prognostics and health management of complex mechanical systems

Abstract

In the prognostics and health management of mechanical systems, achieving high reliability requires high-quality data for analysis and model training to avoid intensive misalarms and false detections. This research introduces a novel unsupervised Bayesian change-point detection approach specifically tailored to improve the accuracy and dependability of data used in the performance evaluation, fault diagnostics, and predictive maintenance of such systems. By leveraging this method, the precision of change-point detection in operational data is significantly heightened, effectively discerning between normal conditions and potential outliers within the recorded data sequences. The proposed approach replaces the reliance on traditional outlier detection methods with an innovative utilization of prediction error metrics, enriched with statistical analysis to assess and bolster the robustness of the detection algorithm. Conducted case studies on data from the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system of 92 wind turbines highlight the advanced data cleaning capabilities of our method, which markedly outperforms previous techniques including quartile, Gaussian mixture models, isolation forests, and local outlier factor algorithms. The findings illustrate the methodology’s efficacy in obtaining rcleaned data, which are crucial for the reliable prognostics and health management frameworks of mechanic system, and enhance the confidence in feature extraction and performance prediction.