Hierarchical spline for time series prediction: An application to naval ship engine failure rate

Predicting equipment failure is important because it could improve availability and cut down the operating budget. Previous literature has attempted to model failure rate with bathtub-formed function, Weibull distribution, Bayesian network, or analytic hierarchy process. But these models perform well with a sufficient amount of data and could not incorporate the two salient characteristics: imbalanced category and sharing structure. Hierarchical model has the advantage of partial pooling. The proposed model is based on Bayesian hierarchical B-spline. Time series of the failure rate of 99 Republic of Korea Naval ships are modeled hierarchically, where each layer corresponds to ship engine, engine type, and engine archetype. As a result of the analysis, the suggested model predicted the failure rate of an entire lifetime accurately in multiple situational conditions, such as prior knowledge of the engine.