Self-Monitoring using Joint Human-Machine Learning : Algorithms and Applications

Abstract: The ability to diagnose deviations and predict faults effectively is an important task in various industrial domains for minimizing costs and productivity loss and also conserving environmental resources. However, the majority of the efforts for diagnostics are still carried out by human experts in a time-consuming and expensive manner. Automated data-driven solutions are needed for continuous monitoring of complex systems over time. On the other hand, domain expertise plays a significant role in developing, evaluating, and improving diagnostics and monitoring functions. Therefore, automatically derived solutions must be able to interact with domain experts by taking advantage of available a priori knowledge and by incorporating their feedback into the learning process.This thesis and appended papers tackle the problem of generating a real-world self-monitoring system for continuous monitoring of machines and operations by developing algorithms that can learn data streams and their relations over time and detect anomalies using joint-human machine learning. Throughout this thesis, we have described a number of different approaches, each designed for the needs of a self-monitoring system, and have composed these methods into a coherent framework. More specifically, we presented a two-layer meta-framework, in which the first layer was concerned with learning appropriate data representations and detectinganomalies in an unsupervised fashion, and the second layer aimed at interactively exploiting available expert knowledge in a joint human-machine learning fashion.Furthermore, district heating has been the focus of this thesis as the application domain with the goal of automatically detecting faults and anomalies by comparing heat demands among different groups of customers. We applied and enriched different methods on this domain, which then contributed to the development and improvement of the meta-framework. The contributions that result from the studies included in this work can be summarized into four categories: (1) exploring different data representations that are suitable for the self-monitoring task based on data characteristics and domain knowledge, (2) discovering patterns and groups in data that describe normal behavior of the monitored system/systems, (3) implementing methods to successfully discriminate anomalies from the normal behavior, and (4) incorporating domain knowledge and expert feedback into self-monitoring.