Feature based causality analysis and its applications in soft sensor modeling

In industrial processes, causality analysis plays an important role in fault detection and topology building. Aiming to attenuate the influence of common correlation and noise, a feature based causality analysis method is proposed. By using the orthogonality and de-noising in feature analysis, it can capture more efficient causal factors. Moreover, better causal factors can make better predictions. Soft sensors based on least-squares regression and two neural networks are tested to compare the performance when using different causal factors and not using causal factors. The results show that the causal feature based soft sensors obtain the best performance and causal factors are crucial to prediction performance. Hence, it has great application potential owing to its strong interpretability and good accuracy. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.