Detecting and Diagnosing Incipient Building Faults Using Uncertainty Information from Deep Neural Networks

Abstract--Early detection of incipient faults is of vital importance toreducing maintenance costs, saving energy, and enhancing occupant comfort in buildings. Popular supervised learning models such as deep neural networks are considered promising due to their ability to directly learn from labeled fault data; however, it is known that the performance of supervised learning approaches highly relies on the availability and quality of labeled training data. In Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) applications, the lack of labeled incipient fault data has posed a major challenge to applying these supervised learning techniques to commercial buildings. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes using Monte Carlo dropout (MCdropout) to enhance the supervised learning pipeline, so that the resulting neural network is able to detect and diagnose unseen incipient fault examples. We also examine the proposed MCdropout method on the RP-1043 dataset to demonstrate its effectiveness in indicating the most likely incipient fault types. I. INTRODUCTION Building faults whose impact are less perceivable and/or hinder regular operations are called soft faults [21], [32]. These soft faults, especially in their incipient phase, are hard to detect as their signatures are not generally obvious (due to their magnitudes) and are lurking under measurement/system noise or feedback control actions [10], [27]. Nevertheless, they will impact energy consumption, system performance, and maintenance costs adversely in the long-run if left undetected and unattended [14].