An explainable unsupervised learning framework for scalable machine fault detection in Industry 4.0

Abstract Despite the diverse number of machine learning algorithms reported in the literature for machine fault detection, their implementation is mainly confined to laboratory-scale demonstrations. The complexity and black-box nature of machine learning models, the processing cost involved in appropriate feature extraction, limited access to labeled data, and varying operating conditions are some of the key reasons that curtail their implementation in practical applications. Furthermore, most such models serve as decision support tools, aiding domain experts in root cause analysis, and are not truly autonomous by themselves. To address these challenges, we present a lightweight autoencoder-based unsupervised learning framework to accurately identify machine faults against the changing operating conditions in a real-world scenario. The fault detection strategy is further strengthened by a model agnostic Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP)-based method (kernel SHAP) for identifying the most prominent features contributing to fault detection inference, the findings of which are then explored for identifying trends and correlations among prominent features and various types of faults. The framework is validated using two widely used and publicly available datasets for machine condition monitoring, as well as a large industrial dataset comprising 18 machines installed at three factories in India, monitored for several months.