A scalable fuzzy support vector machine for fault detection in transportation systems

Prognostics and health management can improve the reliability and safety of transportation systems. Data collected from diverse sources provide a chance and at the same time a challenge for data-driven PHM methods and models. The data often exhibit challenging characteristics like imbalanced data on normal and faulty conditions, noise and outliers, data points of different importance for the data-driven model, etc. In this paper, a k nearest neighbors-based fuzzy support vector machine is proposed for reducing the computational burden and tackling the issue of imbalance and outlier data, in fault detection. Fault detection is mathematically a classification problem. In this paper, the reverse nearest neighbors technique is adopted for detecting outliers and the k nearest neighbors technique is used to identify the borderline points for defining the classification hyperplane in support vector machines. Considering the position of each data point and the distribution of its nearest neighbors, a new method is proposed for calculating their estimation error costs. The proposed method is verified by comparison with several benchmark methods on five public datasets. Then, a real case study concerning fault detection in a braking system of a high-speed train is considered.