Self-starting process monitoring based on transfer learning

Abstract Conventional self-starting control schemes can perform poorly when monitoring processes with early shifts, being limited by the number of historical observations sampled. In real applications, pre-observed data sets from other production lines are always available, prompting us to propose a scheme that monitors the target process using historical data obtained from other sources. The methodology of self-taught clustering from unsupervised transfer learning is revised to transfer knowledge from previous observations and improve out-of-control (OC) performance, especially for processes with early shifts. However, if the difference in distribution between the target process and the pre-observed data set is large, our scheme may not be the best. Simulation results and two illustrative examples demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme.