Novel Model Based on Stacked Autoencoders with Sample-Wise Strategy for Fault Diagnosis

Autoencoders are used for fault diagnosis in chemical engineering. To improve their performance, experts have paid close attention to regularized strategies and the creation of new and effective cost functions. However, existing methods are modified on the basis of only one model. This study provides a new perspective for strengthening the fault diagnosis model, which attempts to gain useful information from a model (teacher model) and applies it to a new model (student model). It pretrains the teacher model by fitting ground truth labels and then uses a sample-wise strategy to transfer knowledge from the teacher model. Finally, the knowledge and the ground truth labels are used to train the student model that is identical to the teacher model in terms of structure. The current student model is then used as the teacher of next student model. After step-by-step teacher-student reconfiguration and training, the optimal model is selected for fault diagnosis. Besides, knowledge distillation is applied in training procedures. The proposed method is applied to several benchmarked problems to prove its effectiveness.