Skewness Reduction Approach in Multi-Attribute Process Monitoring

In multi-attribute process monitoring, when a control chart signals an out-of-control condition indicating the existence of a special cause, knowing when the process has really changed (the change point) accelerates the identification of the source of the special cause and makes the corrective measures to be employed sooner. This, of course, results in a considerable amount of savings in time and money. Since many real world multi-attribute processes are Poisson and most process changes are step-change, a new method is proposed, in this paper, to derive the maximum likelihood estimator of the time of a step-change in the mean vector of multivariate Poisson processes. In this method, two transformations are first employed to almost remove the inherent skewness involved in multi-attribute processes and make them almost multivariate normal, and also to almost diminish correlations between the attributes. Then, a T2 control chart is employed for out-of-control detection and a maximum likelihood estimator is used to estimate the change point. The performance of the proposed methodology is illustrated using some simulation experiments in which we show that the proposed procedure is relatively accurate and reliable in detecting and estimating the change point.

Multivariate statistical process control (MSPC) charts are particularly useful when there is a need to simultaneously monitor several quality characteristics of a process. Most of the control charts in MSPC assume that the quality characteristics follow some parametric multivariate distribution, such as the normal. This assumption is almost impossible to be justified in practice. Distribution-free MSPC charts are attractive, as they can overcome this hurdle by guaranteeing a stable (or in-control (IC)) performance of the control chart without the assumption of a parametric multivariate process distribution. Utilizing an existing distribution-free multivariate tolerance interval, we propose a Phase II Shewhart-type distribution-free MSPC chart for individual observations, with control limits based on Phase I order statistics. In addition to being easy to interpret, the proposed chart preserves the original scale of measurements and can easily identify out-of-control variables after a signal. The exact in-control performance based on the conditional and unconditional perspectives is presented and examined along with the control limits determination. The out-of-control performance of the chart is studied by simulation for data from a number of multivariate distributions. Illustrative examples are provided for chart implementation, using both real and simulated data, along with a summary and conclusions.

Multivariate process control has recently gained significant attention because it takes into account the correlation between process variables and offers a more comprehensive understanding of the overall process behavior. In line with this phenomenon, this paper proposes the multivariate triple sampling Hotelling’s T 2 (MTS) control chart as an efficient process monitoring method in multivariate statistical process control. The mathematical properties of the MTS chart are also derived. The performance of the MTS chart is assessed using key performance metrics, such as average run length (ARL), average number of observations to signal (ANOS) and expected average number of observations to signal (EANOS). The performance of the MTS chart is compared with that of the existing multivariate double sampling Hotelling’s T 2 (MDS) chart. The findings indicate that the MTS chart consistently surpasses the MDS chart across all performance metrics, demonstrating its superior capability in detecting shifts for a multivariate process. Notably, the MTS chart exhibits lower ARL, ANOS and EANOS values, emphasizing its effectiveness in promptly identifying process shifts. In terms of practical application, an example is given to elucidate the execution of the MTS chart.

Multivariate Statistical Process Control (MSPC) techniques are effective tools for detecting the abnormalities of multivariate process variation. MSPC techniques are based on overall statistics; this has caused the difficulties in interpretation of the alarm signal, that is, MSPC charts do not provide the necessary information about which process variables (or subset of them) are responsible for the signal, and this task is left up to the quality engineers in production field. This article proposes a model based on LS-SVM pattern recognizer to diagnose the bivariate process abnormality in covariance matrix. The main property of this model is a supplement of MSPC |S| chart to identify the variable(s) which is (are) responsible for the process abnormality when |S| chart issue a warning signal. Through simulation experiment, the performance of the model is evaluated by accuracy rate of pattern recognition. The results indicate that the proposed model is an effective method to interpret the root causes of the process abnormality. A bivariate example is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed model.

The T 2 control chart is widely adopted in multivariate statistical process control. However, when dealing with asymmetrical or multimodal distributions using the traditional T 2 control chart, some points with relatively high occurrence possibility might be excluded, while some points with relatively low occurrence possibility might be accepted. Motived by the thought of the highest posterior density credible region, we develop a control chart based on the highest possibility region to solve this problem. It is shown that the proposed multivariate control chart will not only meet the false alarm requirement, but also ensure that all the in-control points are with relatively high occurrence possibility. The advantages and effectiveness of the proposed control chart are demonstrated by some numerical examples in the end.

In many applications of manufacturing and service industries, the quality of a process is characterized by the functional relationship between a response variable and one or more explanatory variables. Profile monitoring is for checking the stability of this relationship over time. In some situations, multiple profiles are required in order to model the quality of a product or process effectively. General multivariate linear profile monitoring is particularly useful in practice due to its simplicity and flexibility. However, in such situations, the existing parametric profile monitoring methods suffer from a drawback in that when the profile parameter dimensionality is large, the detection ability of the procedures commonly used T2-type charting statistics is likely to decline substantially. Moreover, it is also challenging to isolate the type of profile parameter change in such high-dimensional circumstances. These issues actually inherit from those of the conventional multivariate control charts. To resolve these issues, this paper develops a new methodology for monitoring general multivariate linear profiles, including the regression coefficients and profile variation. After examining the connection between the parametric profile monitoring and multivariate statistical process control, we propose to apply a variable-selection-based multivariate control scheme to the transformations of estimated profile parameters. Our proposed control chart is capable of determining the shift direction automatically based on observed profile data. Thus, it offers a balanced protection against various profile shifts. Moreover, the proposed control chart provides an easy but quite effective diagnostic aid. A real-data example from the logistics service shows that it performs quite well in the application.

In multivariate statistical process control (MSPC) applications, process mean shifts sometimes occur in only a few components. To solve this MSPC problem, many control charts were proposed in the literature. Most of these charts assumed that the multivariate quality characteristics are normally distributed. Among them, the control chart proposed by Zou and Qiu (2009), incorporating the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) method into the EWMA scheme, has the best overall performance. In this paper, we extend the classical multivariate LASSO control chart to a robust version that has an affine-invariance property and is distribution free under the family of elliptical direction distributions, indicating that the in-control run-length distribution is the same for any continuous distribution in this family and the control limit can be acquired from the multivariate standard normal distribution. Our simulation results show that the proposed method is very efficient in detecting various sparse shifts under heavy-tailed and skewed multivariate distributions. In addition, it is easy to implement with an iterative algorithm and the least angle regression (LARS) algorithm. White-wine data illustrates that the proposed control chart performs quite well in applications.

Abstract: Multivariate control charts are essential tools in multivariate statistical process control (MSPC). “Shewhart-type” charts are control charts using rational subgroupings which are effective in the detection of large shifts. Recently, the one-class classification problem has attracted a lot of interest. Three methods are typically used to solve this type of classification problem. These methods include the k−center method, the nearest neighbor method, one-class support vector machine (OCSVM), and the support vector data description (SVDD). In industrial applications, like statistical process control (SPC), practitioners successfully used SVDD to detect anomalies or outliers in the process. In this paper, we reformulate the standard support vector data description and derive a least squares version of the method. This least-squares support vector data description (LS-SVDD) is used to design a control chart for monitoring the mean vector of processes. We compare the performance of the LS-SVDD chart with the SVDD and T2 chart using out-of-control Average Run Length (ARL) as the performance metric. The experimental results indicate that the proposed control chart has very good performance.

Multivariate monitoring and control schemes based on latent variable methods have been receiving increasing attention by industrial practitioners in the last 15 years. Several companies have enthusiastically adopted the methods and have reported many success stories. Applications have been reported where multivariate statistical process control, fault detection and diagnosis is achieved by utilizing the latent variable space, for continuous and batch processes, as well as, for process transitions as for example start ups and re‐starts. This paper gives an overview of the latest developments in multivariate statistical process control (MSPC) and its application for fault detection and isolation (FDI) in industrial processes. It provides a critical review of the methodology and describes how it is transferred to the industrial environment. Recent applications of latent variable methods to process control as well as to image analysis for monitoring and feedback control are discussed. Finally it is emphasized that the multivariate nature of the data should be preserved when data compression and data preprocessing is applied. It is shown that univariate data compression and reconstruction may hinder the validity of multivariate analysis by introducing spurious correlations. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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In multivariate statistical process control (MSPC), regular multivariate control charts (eg, T2) are shown to be effective in detecting out‐of‐control signals based upon an overall statistic. But these charts do not relieve the need for multivariate process pattern recognition (MPPR). MPPR would be very useful for quality operators to locate the assignable causes that give rise to out‐of‐control situation in multivariate manufacturing process. Deep learning has been widely applied and obtained many successes in image and visual analysis. This paper presents an effective and reliable deep learning method known as stacked denoising autoencoder (SDAE) for MPPR in manufacturing processes. This study will concentrate on developing a SDAE model to learn effective discriminative features from the process signals through deep network architectures. Feature visualization is performed to explicitly present feature representations of the proposed SDAE model. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed SDAE model is capable of implementing detection and recognition of various process patterns in complicated multivariate processes. Analysis from this study provides the guideline in developing deep learning‐based MSPC systems.

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