Predictive maintenance is a field of study whose main objective is to optimize the timing and type of maintenance to perform on various industrial systems. This aim involves maximizing the availability time of the monitored system and minimizing the number of resources used in maintenance. Predictive maintenance is currently undergoing a revolution thanks to advances in industrial systems monitoring within the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Likewise, advances in artificial intelligence and data mining allow the processing of a great amount of data to provide more accurate and advanced predictive models. In this context, many actors have become interested in predictive maintenance research, becoming one of the most active areas of research in computing, where academia and industry converge. The objective of this paper is to conduct a systematic literature review that provides an overview of the current state of research concerning predictive maintenance from a data mining perspective. The review presents a first taxonomy that implies different phases considered in any data mining process to solve a predictive maintenance problem, relating the predictive maintenance tasks with the main data mining tasks to solve them. Finally, the paper presents significant challenges and future research directions in terms of the potential of data mining applied to predictive maintenance.This article is categorized under: Application Areas > Industry Specific Applications Technologies > Internet of Things

Studies on the prediction of student success in distance learning have explored mainly demographics factors and student interactions with the virtual learning environments. However, it is remarkable that a very limited number of studies use information about the assignments submitted by students as influential factor to predict their academic achievement. This paper aims to explore the real importance of assignment information for solving students’ performance prediction in distance learning and evaluate the beneficial effect of including this information. We investigate and compare this factor and its potential from two information representation approaches: the traditional representation based on single instances and a more flexible representation based on Multiple Instance Learning (MIL), focus on handle weakly labeled data. A comparative study is carried out using the Open University Learning Analytics dataset, one of the most important public datasets in education provided by one of the greatest online universities of United Kingdom. The study includes a wide set of different types of machine learning algorithms addressed from the two data representation commented, showing that algorithms using only information about assignments with a representation based on MIL can outperform more than 20% the accuracy with respect to a representation based on single instance learning. Thus, it is concluded that applying an appropriate representation that eliminates the sparseness of data allows to show the relevance of a factor, such as the assignments submitted, not widely used to date to predict students’ academic performance. Moreover, a comparison with previous works on the same dataset and problem shows that predictive models based on MIL using only assignments information obtain competitive results compared to previous studies that include other factors to predict students performance.

Predicting students’ performance in distance courses is a very relevant task to help teachers identify students who need reinforcement or extension activities. Nevertheless, identifying the student’s progress is highly complicated due to the large number of students and the lack of direct interaction. Artificial intelligence algorithms contribute to overcoming this problem by automatically analyzing the features and interactions of each student with the e-learning platform. The main limitations of the previous proposals are that they do not consider a ranking between the different marks obtained by students and the most accurate models are usually black boxes without comprehensibility. This paper proposes to use an optimized ordinal classification algorithm, FlexNSLVOrd, that performs a prediction of student’s performance in four ranking classes (Withdrawn < Fail < Pass < Distinction) by generating highly understandable models. The experimental study uses the OULA dataset and compares 10 state-of-the-art methods on 7 different courses and 3 classical classification metrics. The results, validated with statistical analysis, show that FlexNSLVOrd has higher performance than the other models and achieves significant differences with the rest of the proposals. In addition, the interpretability of FlexNSLVOrd is compared with other rule-based models, and simpler and more representative rules are obtained.

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) emerges as a critical task of Industry 4.0, driving operational efficiency, minimizing downtime, and reducing maintenance costs. However, real-world industrial environments present unsolved challenges, especially in predicting simultaneous and correlated faults under evolving conditions. Traditional batch-based and deep learning approaches for simultaneous fault prediction often fall short due to their assumptions of static data distributions and high computational demands, making them unsuitable for dynamic, resource-constrained systems. In response, we propose OEMLHAT (Online Ensemble of Multi-Label Hoeffding Adaptive Trees), a novel model tailored for real-time, multi-label fault prediction in non-stationary industrial settings. OEMLHAT introduces a scalable online ensemble architecture that integrates online bagging, dynamic feature subspacing, and adaptive output weighting. This design allows it to efficiently handle concept drift, high-dimensional input spaces, and label sparsity, key bottlenecks in existing PdM solutions. Experimental results on three public multi-label PdM case studies demonstrate substantial improvements in predictive performance of OEMLHAT over previous batch-based and online proposals for multi-label classification, particularly with an average improvement in micro-averaged F1-score of 18.49% over the second most-accurate batch-based proposal and of 8.56% in the case of the second best online model. By addressing a critical gap in online multi-label learning for PdM, this work provides a robust and interpretable solution for next-generation industrial monitoring systems for fault detection, particularly for rare and concurrent failures.