High-speed train fault detection with unsupervised causality-based feature extraction methods

With the development of smart sensors, large amount of operating data collected from a complex system as a high-speed train providing opportunities in efficient and effective fault detection and diagnosis (FDD). The data brings also challenges in the FDD modelling process, since the various signals may be redundant, useless and noisy for the FDD modelling of a specific sub-system. The data-driven methods suffer also from the curse of dimensionality. Feature dimension reduction can reduce the dimension of the monitoring dataset and eliminate the useless information. Different from the classical methods based on the correlation among variables, recent studies have shown that causality-based methods can make the FDD model more explanatory and robust. From the adjacency matrix of the causal network diagram, three unsupervised causality-based feature extraction methods for FDD in the braking system of a high-speed train are proposed in this paper. By constructing the causal network diagram among the raw monitoring feature variables through the causal discovery algorithm, the proposed methods extract informative features based on the causal adjacency matrix or the full causal adjacency matrix proposed in this work. These methods are adopted for fault detection with real dataset collected from the braking system in a high-speed train to verify their effectiveness. The experimental results show that the proposed causality-based feature extraction methods are effective and have certain advantages in comparison with the classical correlation-based methods. Especially, the feature extraction method based on the correlation matrix constructed from full causal adjacency matrix achieves better and stable results than the benchmark methods in the experiment.

Automated summary

With the advancement of smart sensors, there are more opportunities for efficient and effective fault detection and diagnosis in complex systems like high-speed trains. However, challenges arise due to the redundancy, uselessness, and noise of the collected data, as well as the curse of dimensionality in data-driven methods. Causality-based feature extraction methods have been shown to offer more explanatory and robust FDD modeling than traditional correlation-based methods, with experiments demonstrating their effectiveness and advantages in fault detection.