Fault analysis using state-of-the-art classifiers

Fault Analysis is the detection and diagnosis of malfunction in machine operation or process control. Early fault analysis techniques were reserved for high critical plants such as nuclear or chemical industries where abnormal event prevention is given utmost importance. The techniques developed were a result of decades of technical research and models based on extensive characterization of equipment behavior. This requires in-depth knowledge of the system and expert analysis to apply these methods for the application at hand. Since machine learning algorithms depend on past process data for creating a system model, a generic autonomous diagnostic system can be developed which can be used for application in common industrial setups. In this thesis, we look into some of the techniques used for fault detection and diagnosis multi-class and one-class classifiers. First we study Feature Selection techniques and the classifier performance is analyzed against the number of selected features. The aim of feature selection is to reduce the impact of irrelevant variables and to reduce computation burden on the learning algorithm. We introduce the feature selection algorithms as a literature survey. Only few algorithms are implemented to obtain the results. Fault data from a Radio Frequency (RF) generator is used to perform fault detection and diagnosis. Comparison between continuous and discrete fault data is conducted for the Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Radial Basis Function Network (RBF) classifiers. In the second part we look into one-class classification techniques and their application to fault detection. One-class techniques were primarily developed to identify one class of objects from all other possible objects. Since all fault occurrences in a system cannot be simulated or recorded, one-class techniques help in identifying abnormal events. We introduce four one-class classifiers and analyze them using Receiver-Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. We also develop a feature extraction method for the RF generator data which is used to obtain results for one-class classifiers and Radial Basis Function Network two class classification. To apply these techniques for real-time verification, the RIT Fault Prediction software is built. LabView environment is used to build a basic data management and fault detection using Radial Basis Function Network. This software is stand alone and acts as foundation for future implementations

Software defect prediction: do different classifiers find the same defects?

Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.During the last 10 years, hundreds of different defect prediction models have been published. The performance of the classifiers used in these models is reported to be similar with models rarely performing above the predictive performance ceiling of about 80% recall. We investigate the individual defects that four classifiers predict and analyse the level of prediction uncertainty produced by these classifiers. We perform a sensitivity analysis to compare the performance of Random Forest, Naïve Bayes, RPart and SVM classifiers when predicting defects in NASA, open source and commercial datasets. The defect predictions that each classifier makes is captured in a confusion matrix and the prediction uncertainty of each classifier is compared. Despite similar predictive performance values for these four classifiers, each detects different sets of defects. Some classifiers are more consistent in predicting defects than others. Our results confirm that a unique subset of defects can be detected by specific classifiers. However, while some classifiers are consistent in the predictions they make, other classifiers vary in their predictions. Given our results, we conclude that classifier ensembles with decision-making strategies not based on majority voting are likely to perform best in defect prediction.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Combining Spreadsheet Smells for Improved Fault Prediction

Spreadsheets are commonly used in organizations as a programming tool for business-related calculations and decision making. Since faults in spreadsheets can have severe business impacts, a number of approaches from general software engineering have been applied to spreadsheets in recent years, among them the concept of code smells. Smells can in particular be used for the task of fault prediction. An analysis of existing spreadsheet smells, however, revealed that the predictive power of individual smells can be limited. In this work we therefore propose a machine learning based approach which combines the predictions of individual smells by using an AdaBoost ensemble classifier. Experiments on two public datasets containing real-world spreadsheet faults show significant improvements in terms of fault prediction accuracy.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, to be published in 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results Trac