Early detection of incipient faults in industrial processes is increasingly becoming important, as these faults can slowly develop into serious abnormal events, an emergency situation, or even failure of critical equipment. Multivariate statistical process monitoring methods are currently established for abrupt fault detection. Among these, the canonical variate analysis (CVA) was proven to be effective for dynamic process monitoring. However, the traditional CVA indices may not be sensitive enough for incipient faults. In this work, an extension of CVA, called the canonical variate dissimilarity analysis (CVDA), is proposed for process incipient fault detection in nonlinear dynamic processes under varying operating conditions. To handle the non-Gaussian distributed data, the kernel density estimation was used for computing detection limits. A CVA dissimilarity based index has been demonstrated to outperform traditional CVA indices and other dissimilarity-based indices, namely the dissimilarity analysis, recursive dynamic transformed component statistical analysis, and generalized canonical correlation analysis, in terms of sensitivity when tested on slowly developing multiplicative and additive faults in a continuous stirred-tank reactor under closed-loop control and varying operating conditions.

Kernel methods are a class of learning machines for the fast recognition of nonlinear patterns in any data set. In this paper, the applications of kernel methods for feature extraction in industrial process monitoring are systematically reviewed. First, we describe the reasons for using kernel methods and contextualize them among other machine learning tools. Second, by reviewing a total of 230 papers, this work has identified 12 major issues surrounding the use of kernel methods for nonlinear feature extraction. Each issue was discussed as to why they are important and how they were addressed through the years by many researchers. We also present a breakdown of the commonly used kernel functions, parameter selection routes, and case studies. Lastly, this review provides an outlook into the future of kernel-based process monitoring, which can hopefully instigate more advanced yet practical solutions in the process industries.

Kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) is an effective and efficient technique for monitoring nonlinear processes. However, associating it with upper control limits (UCLs) based on the Gaussian distribution can deteriorate its performance. In this paper, the kernel density estimation (KDE) technique was used to estimate UCLs for KPCA-based nonlinear process monitoring. The monitoring performance of the resulting KPCA–KDE approach was then compared with KPCA, whose UCLs were based on the Gaussian distribution. Tests on the Tennessee Eastman process show that KPCA–KDE is more robust and provide better overall performance than KPCA with Gaussian assumption-based UCLs in both sensitivity and detection time. An efficient KPCA-KDE-based fault identification approach using complex step differentiation is also proposed.