Factor Analysis in Fault Diagnostics Using Random Forest

Factor analysis or sometimes referred to as variable analysis has been extensively used in classification problems for identifying specific factors that are significant to particular classes. This type of analysis has been widely used in application such as customer segmentation, medical research, network traffic, image, and video classification. Today, factor analysis is prominently being used in fault diagnosis of machines to identify the significant factors and to study the root cause of a specific machine fault. The advantage of performing factor analysis in machine maintenance is to perform prescriptive analysis (helps answer what actions to take?) and preemptive analysis (helps answer how to eliminate the failure mode?). In this paper, a real case of an industrial rotating machine was considered where vibration and ambient temperature data was collected for monitoring the health of the machine. Gaussian mixture model-based clustering was used to cluster the data into significant groups, and spectrum analysis was used to diagnose each cluster to a specific state of the machine. The significant features that attribute to a particular mode of the machine were identified by using the random forest classification model. The significant features for specific modes of the machine were used to conclude that the clusters generated are distinct and have a unique set of significant features.