A procedure for assessing of machine health index data prediction quality

The paper discusses the challenge of evaluating the prognosis quality of machine health index (HI) data. Many existing solutions in machine health forecasting involve visual assessing of the quality of predictions to roughly gauge the similarity between predicted and actual samples, lacking precise measures or decisions. In this paper, we introduce a universal procedure with multiple variants and criteria. The overarching concept involves comparing predicted data with true HI time series, but each procedure variant has a specific pattern determined through statistical analysis. Additionally, a statistically established threshold is employed to classify the result as either a reliable or non-reliable prognosis. The criteria include both simple measures (MSE, MAPE) and more advanced ones (Space quantiles-inclusion factor, Kupiec’s POF, and TUFF statistics). Depending on the criterion chosen, the pattern and decision-making process vary. To illustrate effectiveness, we apply the proposed procedure to HI data sourced from the literature, covering both warning (linear degradation) and critical (exponential degradation) stages. While the method yields a binary output, there is potential for extension to a multi-class classification. Furthermore, experienced users can use the quality measure expressed in percentage for more in-depth analysis.