Enhancing failure prediction from timeseries histogram data : through fine-tuned lower-dimensional representations

Abstract: Histogram data are widely used for compressing high-frequency time-series signals due to their ability to capture distributional informa-tion. However, this compression comes at the cost of increased di-mensionality and loss of contextual details from the original features.This study addresses the challenge of effectively capturing changesin distributions over time and their contribution to failure prediction.Specifically, we focus on the task of predicting Time to Event (TTE) forturbocharger failures.In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to improve failure pre-diction by fine-tuning lower-dimensional representations of bi-variatehistograms. The goal is to optimize these representations in a waythat enhances their ability to predict component failure. Moreover, wecompare the performance of our learned representations with hand-crafted histogram features to assess the efficacy of both approaches.We evaluate the different representations using the Weibull Time ToEvent - Recurrent Neural Network (WTTE-RNN) framework, which isa popular choice for TTE prediction tasks. By conducting extensive ex-periments, we demonstrate that the fine-tuning approach yields supe-rior results compared to general lower-dimensional learned features.Notably, our approach achieves performance levels close to state-of-the-art results.This research contributes to the understanding of effective failureprediction from time series histogram data. The findings highlightthe significance of fine-tuning lower-dimensional representations forimproving predictive capabilities in real-world applications. The in-sights gained from this study can potentially impact various indus-tries, where failure prediction is crucial for proactive maintenanceand reliability enhancement.