Outliers detection using an iterative strategy for semi‐supervised learning

As a direct consequence of production systems' digitalization, high‐frequency and high‐dimensional data has become more easily available. In terms of data analysis, latent structures‐based methods are often employed when analyzing multivariate and complex data. However, these methods are designed for supervised learning problems when sufficient labeled data are available. Particularly for fast production rates, quality characteristics data tend to be scarcer than available process data generated through multiple sensors and automated data collection schemes. One way to overcome the problem of scarce outputs is to employ semi‐supervised learning methods, which use both labeled and unlabeled data. It has been shown that it is advantageous to use a semi‐supervised approach in case of labeled data and unlabeled data coming from the same distribution. In real applications, there is a chance that unlabeled data contain outliers or even a drift in the process, which will affect the performance of the semi‐supervised methods. The research question addressed in this work is how to detect outliers in the unlabeled data set using the scarce labeled data set. An iterative strategy is proposed using a combined Hotelling's T2 and Q statistics and applied using a semi‐supervised principal component regression (SS‐PCR) approach on both simulated and real data sets.