Modified kernel principal component analysis based on local structure analysis and its application to nonlinear process fault diagnosis

• Local structure analysis is combined with kernel principal component analysis naturally.
• Two LKPCA based monitoring statistics are constructed for effective fault detection.
• Sensitivity based contribution plots are constructed for fault identification.
• Tennessee Eastman process simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

Traditional kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) concentrates on the global structure analysis of data sets but omits the local information which is also important for process monitoring and fault diagnosis. In this paper, a modified KPCA, referred to as the local KPCA (LKPCA), is proposed based on local structure analysis for nonlinear process fault diagnosis. In order to extract data feature better, local structure analysis is integrated within the KPCA, and this results in a new optimisation objective which naturally involves both global and local structure information. With the application of usual kernel trick, the optimisation problem is transformed into a generalised eigenvalue decomposition on the kernel matrix. For the purpose of fault detection, two monitoring statistics, known as the T2 and Q statistics, are built based on the LKPCA model and confidence limit is computed by kernel density estimation. In order to identify fault variables, contribution plots for monitoring statistics are constructed based on the idea of sensitivity analysis to locate the fault variables. Simulation using the Tennessee Eastman benchmark process shows that the proposed method outperforms the traditional KPCA, in terms of fault detection performance. The results obtained also demonstrate the potential of the proposed fault identification approach.