A New Diagnosis Method with Few-shot Learning Based on a Class-rebalance Strategy for Scarce Faults in Industrial Processes

For industrial processes, new scarce faults are usually judged by experts. The lack of instances for these faults causes a severe data imbalance problem for a diagnosis model and leads to low performance. In this article, a new diagnosis method with few-shot learning based on a class-rebalance strategy is proposed to handle the problem. The proposed method is designed to transform instances of the different faults into a feature embedding space. In this way, the fault features can be transformed into separate feature clusters. The fault representations are calculated as the centers of feature clusters. The representations of new faults can also be effectively calculated with few support instances. Therefore, fault diagnosis can be achieved by estimating feature similarity between instances and faults. A cluster loss function is designed to enhance the feature clustering performance. Also, a class-rebalance strategy with data augmentation is designed to imitate potential faults with different reasons and degrees of severity to improve the model’s generalizability. It improves the diagnosis performance of the proposed method. Simulations of fault diagnosis with the proposed method were performed on the Tennessee-Eastman benchmark. The proposed method achieved average diagnosis accuracies ranging from 81.8% to 94.7% for the eight selected faults for the simulation settings of support instances ranging from 3 to 50. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.