Multiple feature fusion transformer for modeling penicillin fermentation process with unequal sampling intervals

The quality prediction of batch processes is an important task in the field of biological fermentation. However, dynamic nonlinearity, unequal sampling intervals, uneven duration, and multiple features of a batch process make this task challenging. Thus, the multiple-feature fusion transformer (MFFT) model is proposed for the time series quality prediction of a batch process. First, the application of sequence-to-sequence architecture enables MFFT to perform a wide range of sequence prediction tasks. Second, the transformer parallel operation model imposes no rigid requirement for the order of sequence input, allowing the model to deal with problems of unequal interval sampling and utilize the sequence information. Third, MFFT integrates a pretrained ResNet50 as a mycelium status classifier for fusing image information into the features. Moreover, a multiple-feature encoding structure is proposed to integrate sampling time and mycelium status. Finally, multiple tasks in penicillin fermentation have shown that MFFT significantly outperforms existing methods for time series prediction.