A novel approach for fusion of heterogeneous sources of data

With advancements in sensor technology, a heterogeneous set of data, containing samples of scalar, waveform signal, image, or even structured point cloud are becoming increasingly popular. Developing a statistical model, representing the behavior of the underlying system based upon such a heterogeneous set of data can be used in monitoring, control, and optimization of the system. Unfortunately, available methods only focus on the scalar and curve data and do not provide a general framework that can integrate different sources of data to construct a model. This paper poses the problem of estimating a process output, measured by a scalar, curve, an image, or a point cloud by a set of heterogeneous process variables such as scalar process setting, sensor readings, and images. We introduce a general approach in which each set of input data (predictor) as well as the output measurements are represented by tensors. We formulate a linear regression model between the input and output tensors and estimate the parameters by minimizing a least square loss function. In order to avoid overfitting and to reduce the number of parameters to be estimated, we decompose the model parameters using several bases, spanning the input and output spaces. Next, we learn both the bases and their spanning coefficients when minimizing the loss function using an alternating least square (ALS) algorithm. We show that such a minimization has a closed-form solution in each iteration and can be computed very efficiently. Through several simulation and case studies, we evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results reveal the advantage of the proposed method over some benchmarks in the literature in terms of the mean square prediction error.