A Deep Supervised Learning Framework for Data-Driven Soft Sensor Modeling of Industrial Processes

Deep learning has been recently introduced for soft sensors in industrial processes. However, most of the existing deep networks, such as stacked autoencoder, are pretrained in a layerwise unsupervised way to learn feature representations for the raw input data itself. For soft sensors, it is necessary to extract quality-relevant features for quality prediction. Thus, a deep layerwise supervised pretraining framework is proposed for quality-relevant feature extraction and soft sensor modeling in this article, which is based on stacked supervised encoder–decoder (SSED). In SSED, hierarchical quality-relevant features are successively learned by a number of supervised encoder–decoder (SED) models. For each SED, the features from the previous hidden layer are served as new inputs to generate the high-level features that are learned with the constraint of predicting the quality data as good as possible at the output layer of this SED. With this new structure, the SED can learn quality-relevant features that can largely improve the prediction performance. By stacking multiple SEDs, hierarchical quality-relevant features can be progressively learned, and irrelevant information is gradually reduced by deep SSED network. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated on a numerical example and an industrial process of the debutanizer column.