Self-organising symbolic aggregate approximation for real-time fault detection and diagnosis in transient dynamic systems

The development of accurate fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) techniques are an important aspect of monitoring system health, whether it be an industrial machine or human system. In FDD systems where real-time or mobile monitoring is required there is a need to minimise computational overhead whilst maintaining detection and diagnosis accuracy. Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SAX) is one such method, whereby reduced representations of signals are used to create symbolic representations for similarity search. Data reduction is achieved through application of the Piecewise Aggregate Approximation (PAA) algorithm. However, this can often lead to the loss of key information characteristics resulting in misclassification of signal types and a high risk of false alarms. This paper proposes a novel methodology based on SAX for generating more accurate symbolic representations, called Self-Organising Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SOSAX). Data reduction is achieved through the application of an optimised PAA algorithm, Self-Organising Piecewise Aggregate Approximation (SOPAA). The approach is validated through the classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals where it is shown to outperform standard SAX in terms of inter-class separation and intra-class distance of signal types.