Semi-supervised learning for industrial fault detection and diagnosis: A systemic review

The automation of Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) is a central task for many industries today. A myriad of methods are in use, although the most recent leading contenders are data-driven approaches and especially Machine Learning (ML) methods. ML algorithms fall into two main categories: supervised and unsupervised methods, depending on whether or not the instances are labeled with the expected outputs. However, a new approach called Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) has recently emerged that uses a few labeled instances together with other unlabeled instances for the training process. This new approach can significantly improve the accuracy of conventional ML models for industrial environments where labeled data are scarce. SSL has been tested as a promising solution over the past few years for several FDD problems, although there have been no systemic reviews of this sort of approach up until the present review. In this study, an attempt to organize the existing literature on SSL for FDD using the taxonomy of van Engelen & Hoos is reported. The most and the least frequently used SSL algorithms are identified and considered in terms of different fault detection tasks and their most common dataset structure. Moreover, a set of best practices are proposed in the conclusions of this work for implementation under real industrial conditions, so as to avoid some of the most common faults.