Sparse Causal Residual Neural Network for Linear and Nonlinear Concurrent Causal Inference and Root Cause Diagnosis

Reliable and effective fault diagnosis methods are necessary for complex industrial processes that consists of various units. After a process fault is detected, it remains a challenging task to locate the root cause unit and determine the propagation path of the fault. In this paper, a novel method, termed Sparse Causal Residual Neural Network (SCRNN), is proposed and applied for modern industrial root cause diagnosis. The advantage of SCRNN lies in that it can not only recognize linear and nonlinear causal relationships in parallel, but also automatically determine the causality lags and deduce the time delay of causal transmission. Besides, due to the specially designed sparse constraint and optimization algorithm, the SCRNN model can realize the function of key dependent variable selection, avoiding the high computational complexity and complicated procedure brought by pairwise comparison. The feasibility of the proposed method is illustrated through the benchmark TE process.