Evaluation of diagnosis methods in PCA-based Multivariate Statistical Process Control

Multivariate Statistical Process Control (MSPC) based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a well-known methodology in chemometrics that is aimed at testing whether an industrial process is under Normal Operation Conditions (NOC). As a part of the methodology, once an anomalous behaviour is detected, the root causes need to be diagnosed to troubleshoot the problem and/or avoid it in the future. While there have been a number of developments in diagnosis in the past decades, no sound method for comparing existing approaches has been proposed. In this paper, we propose such a procedure and use it to compare several diagnosis methods using randomly simulated data and from realistic data sources. This is a general comparative approach that takes into account factors that have not previously been considered in the literature. The results show that univariate diagnosis is more reliable than its multivariate counterpart.