In the last two decades there has been a large progress in the computational
intelligence research field. The fruits of the effort spent on the research in the discussed
field are powerful techniques for pattern recognition, data mining, data modelling, etc.
These techniques achieve high performance on traditional data sets like the UCI
machine learning database. Unfortunately, this kind of data sources usually represent
clean data without any problems like data outliers, missing values, feature co-linearity,
etc. common to real-life industrial data. The presence of faulty data samples can have
very harmful effects on the models, for example if presented during the training of the
models, it can either cause sub-optimal performance of the trained model or in the worst
case destroy the so far learnt knowledge of the model. For these reasons the application
of present modelling techniques to industrial problems has developed into a research
field on its own. Based on the discussion of the properties and issues of the data and the
state-of-the-art modelling techniques in the process industry, in this paper a novel
unified approach to the development of predictive models in the process industry is
presented