Semi-supervised Variational Autoencoder for Regression: Application on Soft Sensors

We present the development of a semi-supervised regression method using variational autoencoders (VAE), which is customized for use in soft sensing applications. We motivate the use of semi-supervised learning considering the fact that process quality variables are not collected at the same frequency as other process variables leading to many unlabelled records in operational datasets. These unlabelled records are not possible to use for training quality variable predictions based on supervised learning methods. Use of VAEs for unsupervised learning is well established and recently they were used for regression applications based on variational inference procedures. We extend this approach of supervised VAEs for regression (SVAER) to make it learn from unlabelled data leading to semi-supervised VAEs for regression (SSVAER), then we make further modifications to their architecture using additional regularization components to make SSVAER well suited for learning from both labelled and unlabelled process data. The probabilistic regressor resulting from the variational approach makes it possible to estimate the variance of the predictions simultaneously, which provides an uncertainty quantification along with the generated predictions. We provide an extensive comparative study of SSVAER with other publicly available semi-supervised and supervised learning methods on two benchmark problems using fixed-size datasets, where we vary the percentage of labelled data available for training. In these experiments, SSVAER achieves the lowest test errors in 11 of the 20 studied cases, compared to other methods where the second best gets 4 lowest test errors out of the 20.