| Abstract: | Multimode process monitoring has recently attracted much attention both in academy and industry. Conventional methods assume that either the process data are Gaussian in each operation mode, or some process knowledge should be incorporated, thus making the methods supervised. In this paper, a new unsupervised method is developed for multimode process monitoring, which is based on Bayesian inference and two‐step independent component analysis–principal component analysis (ICA–PCA) feature extraction strategy. ICA–PCA is first introduced for feature extraction and dimension reduction. By transferring the traditional monitoring statistic to fault probability in each operation mode, monitoring results in different operation modes can be easily combined by the Bayesian inference. Another contribution of the present paper is the development of a new fault identification method. Through analyses of the posterior probability and the joint probability for the monitored data sample, the correct operation mode or fault scenario can be identified. Three case studies are demonstrated to evaluate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
