Evaluation of machine learning methods for anomaly detection in combined heat and power plant

Sammanfattning: In the hope to increase the detection rate of faults in combined heat and power plant boilers thus lowering unplanned maintenance three machine learning models are constructed and evaluated. The algorithms; k-Nearest Neighbor, One-Class Support Vector Machine, and Auto-encoder have a proven track record in research for anomaly detection, but are relatively unexplored for industrial applications such as this one due to the difficulty in collecting non-artificial labeled data in the field.The baseline versions of the k-Nearest Neighbor and Auto-encoder performed very similarly. Nevertheless, the Auto-encoder was slightly better and reached an area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.966 and 0.615 on the trainingand test period, respectively. However, no sufficiently good results were reached with the One-Class Support Vector Machine. The Auto-encoder was made more sophisticated to see how much performance could be increased. It was found that the AUPRC could be increased to 0.987 and 0.801 on the trainingand test period, respectively. Additionally, the model was able to detect and generate one alarm for each incident period that occurred under the test period.The conclusion is that ML can successfully be utilized to detect faults at an earlier stage and potentially circumvent otherwise costly unplanned maintenance. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of room for improvements in the model and the collection of the data.