From fault detection to anomaly explanation: A case study on predictive maintenance

Predictive Maintenance applications are increasingly complex, with interactions between many components. Black-box models are popular approaches based on deep-learning techniques due to their predictive accuracy. This paper proposes a neural-symbolic architecture that uses an online rule-learning algorithm to explain when the black-box model predicts failures. The proposed system solves two problems in parallel: (i) anomaly detection and (ii) explanation of the anomaly. For the first problem, we use an unsupervised state-of-the-art autoencoder. For the second problem, we train a rule learning system that learns a mapping from the input features to the autoencoder’s reconstruction error. Both systems run online and in parallel. The autoencoder signals an alarm for the examples with a reconstruction error that exceeds a threshold. The causes of the signal alarm are hard for humans to understand because they result from a non-linear combination of sensor data. The rule that triggers that example describes the relationship between the input features and the autoencoder’s reconstruction error. The rule explains the failure signal by indicating which sensors contribute to the alarm and allowing the identification of the component involved in the failure. The system can present global explanations for the black box model and local explanations for why the black box model predicts a failure. We evaluate the proposed system in a real-world case study of Metro do Porto and provide explanations that illustrate its benefits.