In this paper, a multiple classifier machine learning (ML) methodology for predictive maintenance (PdM) is presented. PdM is a prominent strategy for dealing with maintenance issues given the increasing need to minimize downtime and associated costs. One of the challenges with PdM is generating the so-called “health factors,” or quantitative indicators, of the status of a system associated with a given maintenance issue, and determining their relationship to operating costs and failure risk. The proposed PdM methodology allows dynamical decision rules to be adopted for maintenance management, and can be used with high-dimensional and censored data problems. This is achieved by training multiple classification modules with different prediction horizons to provide different performance tradeoffs in terms of frequency of unexpected breaks and unexploited lifetime, and then employing this information in an operating cost-based maintenance decision system to minimize expected costs. The effectiveness of the methodology is demonstrated using a simulated example and a benchmark semiconductor manufacturing maintenance problem.

This article considers critically how one of the oldest and most widely applied statistical methods, principal components analysis (PCA), is employed with spatial data. We first provide a brief guide to how PCA works: This includes robust and compositional PCA variants, links to factor analysis, latent variable modeling, and multilevel PCA. We then present two different approaches to using PCA with spatial data. First we look at the nonspatial approach, which avoids challenges posed by spatial data by using a standard PCA on attribute space only. Within this approach we identify four main methodologies, which we define as (1) PCA applied to spatial objects, (2) PCA applied to raster data, (3) atmospheric science PCA, and (4) PCA on flows. In the second approach, we look at PCA adapted for effects in geographical space by looking at PCA methods adapted for first-order nonstationary effects (spatial heterogeneity) and second-order stationary effects (spatial autocorrelation). We also describe how PCA can be used to investigate multiple scales of spatial autocorrelation. Furthermore, we attempt to disambiguate a terminology confusion by clarifying which methods are specifically termed “spatial PCA” in the literature and how this term has different meanings in different areas. Finally, we look at a further three variations of PCA that have not been used in a spatial context but show considerable potential in this respect: simple PCA, sparse PCA, and multilinear PCA.

The combination of reducing birth rate and increasing life expectancy continues to drive the demographic shift toward an aging population. This, in turn, places an ever-increasing burden on healthcare due to the increasing prevalence of patients with chronic illnesses and the reducing income-generating population base needed to sustain them. The need to urgently address this healthcare “time bomb” has accelerated the growth in ubiquitous, pervasive, distributed healthcare technologies. The current move from hospital-centric healthcare toward in-home health assessment is aimed at alleviating the burden on healthcare professionals, the health care system and caregivers. This shift will also further increase the comfort for the patient. Advances in signal acquisition, data storage and communication provide for the collection of reliable and useful in-home physiological data. Artifacts, arising from environmental, experimental and physiological factors, degrade signal quality and render the affected part of the signal useless. The magnitude and frequency of these artifacts significantly increases when data collection is moved from the clinic into the home. Signal processing advances have brought about significant improvement in artifact removal over the past few years. This paper reviews the physiological signals most likely to be recorded in the home, documenting the artifacts which occur most frequently and which have the largest degrading effect. A detailed analysis of current artifact removal techniques will then be presented. An evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of each of the proposed artifact detection and removal techniques, with particular application to the personal healthcare domain, is provided.

Biosignal measurement and processing is increasingly being deployed in ambulatory situations particularly in connected health applications. Such an environment dramatically increases the likelihood of artifacts which can occlude features of interest and reduce the quality of information available in the signal. If multichannel recordings are available for a given signal source, then there are currently a considerable range of methods which can suppress or in some cases remove the distorting effect of such artifacts. There are, however, considerably fewer techniques available if only a single-channel measurement is available and yet single-channel measurements are important where minimal instrumentation complexity is required. This paper describes a novel artifact removal technique for use in such a context. The technique known as ensemble empirical mode decomposition with canonical correlation analysis (EEMD-CCA) is capable of operating on single-channel measurements. The EEMD technique is first used to decompose the single-channel signal into a multidimensional signal. The CCA technique is then employed to isolate the artifact components from the underlying signal using second-order statistics. The new technique is tested against the currently available wavelet denoising and EEMD-ICA techniques using both electroencephalography and functional near-infrared spectroscopy data and is shown to produce significantly improved results.

Artifact removal from physiological signals is an essential component of the biosignal processing pipeline. The need for powerful and robust methods for this process has become particularly acute as healthcare technology deployment undergoes transition from the current hospital-centric setting toward a wearable and ubiquitous monitoring environment. Currently, determining the relative efficacy and performance of the multiple artifact removal techniques available on real world data can be problematic, due to incomplete information on the uncorrupted desired signal. The majority of techniques are presently evaluated using simulated data, and therefore, the quality of the conclusions is contingent on the fidelity of the model used. Consequently, in the biomedical signal processing community, there is considerable focus on the generation and validation of appropriate signal models for use in artifact suppression. Most approaches rely on mathematical models which capture suitable approximations to the signal dynamics or underlying physiology and, therefore, introduce some uncertainty to subsequent predictions of algorithm performance. This paper describes a more empirical approach to the modeling of the desired signal that we demonstrate for functional brain monitoring tasks which allows for the procurement of a “ground truth” signal which is highly correlated to a true desired signal that has been contaminated with artifacts. The availability of this “ground truth,” together with the corrupted signal, can then aid in determining the efficacy of selected artifact removal techniques. A number of commonly implemented artifact removal techniques were evaluated using the described methodology to validate the proposed novel test platform.