Evaluating the Role of Data Enrichment Approaches towards Rare Event Analysis in Manufacturing

Rare events are occurrences that take place with a significantly lower frequency than more common, regular events. These events can be categorized into distinct categories, from frequently rare to extremely rare, based on factors like the distribution of data and significant differences in rarity levels. In manufacturing domains, predicting such events is particularly important, as they lead to unplanned downtime, a shortening of equipment lifespans, and high energy consumption. Usually, the rarity of events is inversely correlated with the maturity of a manufacturing industry. Typically, the rarity of events affects the multivariate data generated within a manufacturing process to be highly imbalanced, which leads to bias in predictive models. This paper evaluates the role of data enrichment techniques combined with supervised machine learning techniques for rare event detection and prediction. We use time series data augmentation and sampling to address the data scarcity, maintaining its patterns, and imputation techniques to handle null values. Evaluating 15 learning models, we find that data enrichment improves the F1 measure by up to 48% in rare event detection and prediction. Our empirical and ablation experiments provide novel insights, and we also investigate model interpretability.