A novel soft sensor approach for industrial quality prediction based TCN with spatial and temporal attention

Abstract

The complex industrial process is often characterized by strong multivariate coupling and nonlinear dynamic changes, which pose great challenges to modeling and prediction. Traditional deep learning methods are difficult to effectively capture spatiotemporal characteristics of industrial processes, resulting in poor prediction accuracy. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel end-to-end method named STA-TCN, which utilizes a temporal convolutional network (TCN) with both spatial and temporal attention mechanisms. The TCN uses causal and dilated convolutions to capture long temporal patterns in time series data. The spatial attention identifies the significance of different features, while the temporal attention focuses on crucial time steps. This design assigns adaptive weights to different features and emphasizes key moments to improve the accuracy of dynamic processes. We conduct experiments on two industrial datasets and show that the proposed STA-TCN method achieves significantly improved predictive performance compared to TCN for quality prediction of industrial processes. The results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.