Publications

Custom AI Architectures for Predictive Analytics Using Bayesian Statistics and Deep Learning

Predictive analytics has emerged as a vital field with significant potential in industries ranging from energy to mobility. As such, it has become a topic of considerable interest for research. Through the use of statistical models, predictive analytics helps reveal patterns and relationships in complex datasets, generating accurate predictions about future events or outcomes. The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) architectures and data-driven frameworks has further revolutionized the way we perform predictive analytics. However, the broad adoption of AI for predictive analytics is limited due to the lack of custom architectures that can effectively handle the unique complexities of modern datasets and perform robust and accurate predictions. As datasets grow increasingly complex, the need for Bayesian statistics and Deep Learning (DL) in predictive analytics has become increasingly evident. Bayesian statistics offers a versatile framework for incorporating prior knowledge and external knowledge into AI models. This can help mitigate problems such as data sparsity and improve long-term forecasts. Similarly, DL architectures, with their ability to identify and learn complex patterns within datasets, have the potential to unlock new insights and drive innovation in predictive analytics. However, the development of custom AI architectures that leverage such techniques for predictive analytics remains challenging due to their several inherent limitations. This work aims to bridge this research gap by harnessing the power of Bayesian statistics and DL to advance the state-of-the-art in predictive analytics. Specifically, this work proposes custom AI architectures and data-driven frameworks that can (i) perform accurate long-term estimations, (ii) overcome data drift, (iii) provide uncertainty quantifications, (iv) model and predict anomalous behavior, (v) leverage concepts of Design of Experiments, and (vi) perform collaborative modeling. The proposed models and frameworks are evaluated using compelling case studies that demonstrate their effectiveness in improving the accuracy, reliability, and robustness of AI architectures for broader use in predictive analytics.

Uncorrelated Sparse Autoencoder With Long Short-Term Memory for State-of-Charge Estimations in Lithium-Ion Battery Cells
Uncorrelated Sparse Autoencoder With Long Short-Term Memory for State-of-Charge Estimations in Lithium-Ion Battery Cells

For the safe and reliable operation of battery-driven machines, accurate state-of-charge (SOC) estimations are necessary. Unfortunately, existing methods often fail to identify patterns relevant to long-term SOC estimation due to complex battery cell characteristics such as aging. In this paper, we propose the Uncorrelated Sparse Autoencoder with Long Short-Term Memory (USAL). USAL is a novel neural network that addresses the challenging task of long-term SOC estimation given a limited initial history of a cell’s charge-discharge behavior. USAL uses a multi-task learning strategy to harness the advantages of sparse autoencoders and Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) networks by enforcing correlation penalties. The USAL simultaneously learns to (i) generate a latent space of informative SOC encodings from commonly measured cell characteristics, (ii) penalize for high multicollinearity between encodings, and (iii) identify non-trivial long and short temporal correlations between the encodings using LSTM cells. USAL outperforms benchmarked models in our experiments when trained on five initial charge-discharge cycles across multiple battery cells using three publicly available accelerated aging datasets. Note to Practitioners —This paper proposes USAL, a custom-built deep neural network to address the challenging task of long-term SOC estimations in battery cells. Long-term SOC estimation involves estimating SOC for cycles near End-Of-Life (EOL) given some initial charge-discharge cycles. Three fundamental steps involved in long-term SOC estimations using USAL are (i) exploiting a multi-task learning strategy to learn efficient encodings given limited training data, (ii) penalizing these encodings for high correlations to efficiently transform measured inputs into a space of informative features, and (iii) mapping of aging-related trends to support long-term SOC estimations. USAL is designed to be a data-driven SOC estimation method that is (i) capable of alerting the user to a faulty cell when integrated into a real-life Battery Management System (BMS) and (ii) identifying the relative quality of a battery cell from only a few initial charge-discharge cycles.

A Novel Neural Network with Gaussian Process Feedback for Modeling the State-of-Charge of Battery Cells
A Novel Neural Network with Gaussian Process Feedback for Modeling the State-of-Charge of Battery Cells

Although several state-of-charge (SOC) estimation methods have been proposed at the battery cell level, limited work has been done to identify the effect of cell aging on SOC estimations. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel method for estimating the SOC of Lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery cells by accurately modeling the cell aging and degradation information. The proposed method, termed as NNGP, is a deep neural network with Gaussian process feedback. The novel Gaussian process feedback helps the NNGP correlate SOC trends over consecutive charge-discharge cycles. Instead of time, the NNGP leverages available energy to correlate these SOC trends. The deep neural network within the NNGP then utilizes this information and other measured inputs to capture long-term cell aging and degradation trends. The NNGP leverages the most recent cell information to adapt its weights and estimate the SOC by employing an adaptive weighted training strategy. In our experiments on four Li-ion battery cells from three publicly available accelerated aging datasets, the NNGP clearly outperforms other benchmarked methods. The NNGP is also shown to be a useful prognostic tool capable of accurately estimating the SOC for up to 25 cycles in the future with an MAE below 3.5%. When tested under dynamic driving conditions and unknown initial SOC, the NNGP is shown to offer considerable improvements over other benchmarked state-of-art methods. The derivation of the model followed by experimental evaluation is presented.

Conditional Gaussian Mixture Model for Warranty Claims Forecasting
Conditional Gaussian Mixture Model for Warranty Claims Forecasting

Forecasting warranty claims for complex products is a reliability challenge for most manufacturers. Several factors increase the complexity of warranty claims forecasting, including, the limited number of claims reported at the early stage of launch, reporting delays, dynamic change in the fleet size, and design/manufacturing adjustments for the production line. The aggregated effect of those complexities is often referred to as the “warranty data maturation” effect. Unfortunately, most of the existing models for warranty claims forecasting fail to explicitly consider warranty data maturation. This work address warranty data maturation by proposing the Conditional Gaussian Mixture Model (CGMM). CGMM uses historical warranty data from similar products to develop a robust prior joint Gaussian mixture distribution of warranty trends at both, the current and future maturation levels. CGMM then utilizes Bayesian theories to estimate the conditional posterior distribution of the warranty claims at the future maturation level conditional on the warranty data available at the current maturation level. The CGMM identifies non-parametric temporal warranty trends and automatically clusters products into latent groups to establish (learn) an effective prior joint distribution. The CGMM is validated on an extensive automotive warranty claims dataset comprising of four model years and >15,000 different components from >10 million vehicles.