A novel approach for analog fault diagnosis based on neural networks and improved kernel PCA

We have developed a neural-network-based fault diagnosis approach of analog circuits using maximal class separability based kernel principal components analysis (MCSKPCA) as preprocessor. The proposed approach can detect and diagnose faulty components efficiently in the analog circuits by analyzing their time responses. First, using wavelet transform to preprocess the time responses obtains the essential and reduced candidate features of the corresponding response signals. Then, the second preprocessing by MCSKPCA further reduces the dimensionality of candidate features so as to obtain the optimal features with maximal class separability as inputs to the neural networks. This simplifies the architectures reasonably and reduces the computational burden of neural networks drastically. The simulation results show that our resulting diagnostic system can classify the faulty components of analog circuits under test effectively and achieves a competitive classification performance.