Neurocomputing 396 (2020) 487–494

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Neurocomputing
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neucom

Data augmentation in fault diagnosis based on the Wasserstein

generative adversarial network with gradient penalty
Xin Gao, Fang Deng∗, Xianghu Yue
School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Fault detection and diagnosis in industrial process is an extremely essential part to keep away from un-
Received 24 March 2018 desired events and ensure the safety of operators and facilities. In the last few decades various data
Revised 7 September 2018
based machine learning algorithms have been widely studied to monitor machine condition and detect
Accepted 12 October 2018
process faults. However, the faulty datasets in industrial process are hard to acquire. Thus low-data of
Available online 24 April 2019
faulty data or imbalanced data distributions are common to see in industrial processes, resulting in the
Keywords: difficulty to accurately identify different faults for many algorithms. Therefore, in this paper, Wasserstein
Data augmentation generative adversarial network with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) based data augmentation approaches
Fault diagnosis are researched to generate data samples to supplement low-data input set in fault diagnosis field and
Imbalanced data help improve the fault diagnosis accuracies. To verify its efficient, various classifiers are used and three
Low-data domain industrial benchmark datasets are involved to evaluate the performance of GAN based data augmentation
GAN
ability. The results show the fault diagnosis accuracies for classifiers are increased in all datasets after
WGAN-GP
employing the GAN-based data augmentation techniques.
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction difficulty to grasp the features accurately to identify different faults

Fault detection and diagnosis in industrial process is an ex-
tremely important and essential part to keep away from undesired
events and ensure the safety of operators and facilities. Therefore,
this field has been a hot research topic for a long time. Other than
some traditional mathematical model based fault diagnosis meth-
ods, in the last few decades various data based machine learn-
ing algorithms have been widely studied, such as K nearest neigh-
bors (KNN), principal component analysis, support vector machine
(SVM), random forest, etc. [1,2]. Some of them even have been ap-
plied in industrial production systems to monitor machine condi-
tion and detect process faults in [3,4]. However, in practice faulty
dataset in industrial process with large size are hard to acquire, be-
cause the industrial processes are not allowed to operate in faulty
condition in order to keep safety, decrease the maintenance costs,
and avoid the catastrophic accidents. Thus, in industrial processes
for fault diagnosis, low-data of faulty data or imbalanced data dis-
tributions are common to see. Besides, when the limited data is
given, some data based algorithms would suffer from low classi-
fication accuracy, e.g. SVM, KNN, etc. [5]. When the data samples
are in low-data domains or in imbalanced distributions, it will be
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: xin.gao1991@qq.com (X. Gao), dengfang@bit.edu.cn (F. Deng).
because the categories with low-data would easy to be neglected
and submerged by the ones with large quantities of samples.
However, this problem should be solved fundamentally by in-
creasing the training samples, i.e., generating more data from the
raw data. Many previous researches have points out that the data
augmentation would function as a regularizer to help prevent the
overfitting and improve the performance with imbalanced data
distribution [6–10]. It can be demonstrated by many famous com-
petitions where all of winners did data augment to enlarge the
training set and the training performance rose [11–13]. A tradi-
tional method in images domain to synthesize data samples to
supplement the training dataset is geometric transformations such
as rotation, brighten, clips, flips, and channel alterations. However,
in this way, the generated data is simple and just surfaced transfor-
mation from origin data, and the traditional transformation tech-
nique can only be used in the images sets [10]. As for the more
kinds of general datasets, e.g., industrial process data, some more
data augment methods are needed. Therefore, in this paper, GAN is
used for data augmentation to increase the numbers of input data
samples in low-data domain of the imbalanced data distribution
for industrial fault diagnosis.
Until now, GAN has kinds of varieties, for example, the deep
convolutional GANs (DCGANs), the Semi-GAN, Conditional GAN
and auxiliary classifier GAN (ACGAN). Since wasserstein GAN with
gradient penalty (WGAN-GP), has much more stable optimizing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2018.10.109
0925-2312/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
488 X. Gao, F. Deng and X. Yue / Neurocomputing 396 (2020) 487–494
process and can be applied in more architectures, in this paper,
WGAN-GP based data augmentation models are built to generate
auxiliary data for the low-data original dataset in industrial pro-
cess for fault diagnosis. Since the focus of this paper is the ability
of GAN based data augmentation, the classifiers are not required
extremely powerful. Contrarily, more efforts are paid to the GAN
based data augmentation model. To research and evaluate the per-
formance, various classifiers, i.e., logistic regression, decision tree,
random forest, are involved. Besides, two benchmark datasets from
UCI data base and a universal industrial simulation banchmark, i.e.,
Tennessee Eastman Processare are used. The tests seem challeng-
ing, however, the generated data samples by the proposed data
augmentation scheme are testified be of high quality and can im-
prove the classification accuracy after experiments.
The remaining of this paper is organized as follows. In the next
part, the developing backgrounds and the basic GAN algorithm are
given. Then the methods about data augmentation using WGAN-GP
are described in Section 3. In Section 4, some comparative exper-
iments are made to test the effectiveness of the GAN based data
augmentation using the classification accuracy. Finally, in the last
part a conclusion of this study and the further research work plan
are given.
2. Background
2.1. The introduction of GAN
In the last few decades, since the flexible layered structure and
the use of the backpropagation training algorithm, the artificial
neural networks (ANNs) would approximate any function more
easily. Therefore, they attracted numbers of researchers’ attentions
and had wide applications. Note that, in the last ten years, with
the developed computing capacity and the larger amount of the
stored data, some inherent problems in ANNs, such as too many
parameters and the difficult training processes, are relieved in a
great extent. Further, the ANNs has developed into deep neural
networks (DNNs) by equipped with quantities of layers [14,15],
which once again become a hot research topic because they have
more powerful fitting ability, would grasp and learn the features
of data more precisely, and have the potential to solve highly
complicated problems. DNNs can be divided into two categories
according to the usage, i.e., the discriminative models and the
generative models. However, so far, the biggest successes for the
DNNs are the discriminative models, whose operational principle
is projecting the high dimensional input data into a class label
[16]. Nowadays, the deep discriminative models have various
breakthrough applications, e.g., image segmentation, speech recog-
nition, and natural language processing. However, in the other
hand, the deep generative models have less effects. This is because
in the conventional generative models, such as the restricted
Boltzmann machines (RBMs), deep Boltzmann machines (DBMs)
and their varieties [17,18], the models are built by firstly assuming
the distribution of input data, and then searching values of some
variables to make the assumed model fit the real distribution of
the sampled data. In this kind of methods, the objective func-
tions, e.g., maximising the log-likelihood, are always very difficult
to solve, resulting in numerous approximations in the training
process. What is worse, the approximation is to approximate the
lower bound of the objective function instead of the objective
function, which will bring bigger errors.
Fortunately, recently a new generative model, generative adver-
sarial network (GAN) is proposed by Ian Goodfellow [16]. It is com-
posed of two parts, i.e., generator and discriminator, in which the
generator learns the distribution of the input data and generate
new data, while the discriminator is a binary classifier to figure
out the generated data and the real data. The whole process is
optimized by an adversarial training, and DNN can serve as both
generator and discriminator. As the artificial intelligent techniques
developed prosperously, the GAN algorithm meets the requires for
researches and applications in many fields and could bring some
new developing directions for them. Especially, the most widely
applied and researched field is images and computer vision with
many compelling performances, such as generating pictures with
digital or human face, generating the high resolution picture ac-
cording to the low resolution picture, and recovering the object
in image from its outline [16,19,20]. Besides, GANs have also been
used in speech recognising and language processing [21].
However, the direct application of GAN is to build model and
generate data samples which have the same distribution with the
real data samples. Therefore, GAN can be used to cope with the
learning process with insufficient data or insufficient labeled data.
On the other hand, in many fields, large amounts of data are
needed, especially for the applied field of pattern recognition. That
is because with limited data most classifiers may less effective be-
cause of the overfitting in the training process and the less gen-
eralization in the testing process caused by the quantities of pa-
rameters [5]. What a pity, in practice, datasets with very large size
are hard to acquire in some cases, of which faulty dataset in in-
dustrial process is a typical one. In industrial processes for fault
diagnosis, low-data of faulty data or imbalanced data distributions
are common to see, resulting in the difficulty to identify different
faults exactly. Therefore, in this paper, GAN is researched as a tool
of data augmentation to increase the numbers of input data sam-
ples in low-data domain of the imbalanced data distribution.
Until now, GAN has kinds of varieties. For example, the deep
convolutional GANs (DCGANs) are proposed by using the deep con-
volutional neural network in the structure of the adversarial nets
[22]. Following some training tracks, they would generate better
high resolution images. Besides, different with the original GAN
whose input is the real data or fake data and the expected out-
put is the corresponding labels (real or fake), in the Semi-GAN and
Conditional GAN some more information are input to help build
models, e.g., the class of the samples [21,23]. Further more, aux-
iliary classifier GAN (ACGAN) realises multi-classification and can
output the corresponding generated data when assign the wanted
labels, because the objective function concludes not only the part
to identify the real or fake data but also the part to recognise the
class label [24]. On the other hand, the Wasserstein GAN [25] de-
veloped the origin GAN by the optimal process rather than the
structure. Its loss functions are meaningful, directly related with
the quality of the generated samples. Note that the data sam-
ples for fault diagnosis are usually not intuitive and straight, and
WGANs have meaningful loss functions to help figure out the con-
vergence and further generate high-quality samples, thus WGAN is
suitable for the data augmentation for faulty dataset. Besides, since
the advanced version, i.e., Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty
(WGAN-GP), has much more stable optimizing process and can be
applied in more architectures, therefore, in this paper, WGAN-GP
is chosen as the basic tool to help realise and improve the fault
diagnosis ability.
2.2. Generative adversarial networks (GAN)
GAN is originally proposed by Inn Goodfellow [16], which con-
sists of two sub-nets, a generator and a discriminator. By the com-
petitive pair, the algorithm shows a powerful ability to learn rep-
resentation of data. The training strategy is defined by a minimax
game and the pair are trained against each other at the same time.
Generator takes samples from a simple noise distribution, such
as Gaussian and uniform distribution, maps them to a data space
same as input real data, and aims to be trained to generate data as
realistic as possible. On the other hand, the discriminator is used
 X. Gao, F. Deng and X. Yue / Neurocomputing 396 (2020) 487–494
to distinguish the input fake data (from generator) and real data,
and it is trained to not be fooled by the generated fake data. That
is to say, as the result of the training process by the minmax game,
the distribution of the generated fake data tends to be as close as
the distribution of the real data.
More specifically and technically, the objective or the value
function of the minmax game between generator G and discrim-
inator D is shown in Eq. (1),
∼ erator by minimizing the value function to make the Wasserstein
min max E [log(D(x ))] + E [log(1 − D( x ))]
G D x∼Pr ∼ distance of the two distributions, i.e., generated data and real data,
x ∼Pg
where x is real data and the distribution is represented by Pr , while
x˜ is the fake data generated by the generator G and the distribu-
tion is represented by Pg . Specifically, x˜ can be denoted by x˜ = G(z )
in which z is the noise signal sampled from any distribution, e.g.,
Gaussian and uniform distribution.
In Eq. (1), the sum of two mean values is just the Jensen–
Shannon divergence between the real data and the generated fake
data. From the value function, it can be seen that in each iteration
of the training process, when the generator is given, the discrimi-
nator is trained to optimal by maximizing the Jensen–Shannon di-
vergence to distinguish real data and generated fake data. Then,
the discriminator is fixed and the generator is trained by mini-
mizing the Jensen–Shannon divergence to make the generated fake
data as realistic as possible. Therefore, the training process of GAN
is said a minmax game, and the aforementioned optimizing pro-
cesses are realized through back-propagation. After large numbers
of iterations, in the end, the fake data generated by the generator
G are so realistic that the discriminator can not distinguish the real
data and generated fake one any more.
However, in practice the training process of the minmax game
is always unstable, mainly because the Jensen–Shannon divergence
is discrete which tends to cause the discriminator saturates and
gradients vanish in the training process. To this end, some mea-
sures are proposed. For example, for the DCGAN [22], many train-
ing suggestions, i.e., batch normalization, ReLU activation, little
numbers of fully connected layers, can be used to make the train-
ing process more stable and the quality of generated data higher.
However, the DCGAN needs carefully designed the architecture and
some training tricks.
3. Data augmentation using WGAN-GP
3.1. Wasserstein GAN
In the original GAN algorithm, the training process of the min-
max game is always unstable, which results from the not contin-
uous Jensen–Shannon divergence. Besides, the original GAN has a
problem of convergence, i.e., when to stop the training can not be
really known. This is because there is no numerical value to show
how well the parameters are tuned. Thus, the users have to look
at the generated samples to tell whether the model of the GAN is
trained well or not. That is why GAN now is mainly applied pros-
perously in just the images field.
Considering the above-mentioned problem, Wasserstein GAN
(WGAN) is proposed [25]. Instead of using the Jensen–Shannon di-
vergence in the value function of the original GAN, it uses Wasser-
stein distance W(P, Q) which is continuous under mild assumptions
and describes the distance between the points in the distribution
P and distribution Q. To be more specific, the Wasserstein distance
W(P, Q) represents the minimal cost of mass to move the distribu-
tion P to Q. The value function of WGAN is shown in Eq. (2),
min max E [D(x )] − E [D(x˜)]
G D∈D x∼Pr x˜∼Pg
where the latter part, i.e., the difference of two mean value, is just
the Wasserstein distance between distribution of the real data and
489
distribution of the generated fake data. Pr represents the distribu-
tion of real data and Pg is the distribution of fake data generated
by the generator G by x˜ = G(z ) (z is sampled from some simple
noise distribution), which is as same as the original GAN. What is
more, the training process is similar too. In each training iteration,
at first the generator is fixed, the discriminator is trained to opti-
mal by maximizing the value function to distinguish real data and
generated fake data. Then, the discriminator is fixed to train gen-
(1)
as close as possible. In the end, after large numbers of iterations,
the minmax game converges and the discriminator can not distin-
guish the real data and generated fake one any more. It worths to
mention that the Wasserstein distance used in the value function
of WGAN is continuous, which not only makes the training process
more stable but also can reflect the quality of generated sample.
The lower the Wasserstein distance (loss), the higher quality the
generated image.
However, in Eq. (2) D denotes the set of 1-Lipschitz functions.
Therefore, to realize the WGAN algorithm, discriminator D should
belong to the 1-Lipschitz functions. In [25], the authors show that
the restriction can be loosen by multiplying a scaling factor. Thus,
Eq. (2) can be approached by the discriminator D belonging to
K-Lipschitz functions, which would be realised by clipping the
weights in each layer of the discriminator D into the range [−c, c].
In this way, the WGAN algorithm is done with the advantages,
i.e. the more stable training processing and the meaningful value
function.
3.2. Wasserstein GAN with gradient panelty (WGAN-GP)
As mentioned above, WGAN redesigned the loss function, mak-
ing it related with the quality of sample, and improved the stabil-
ity of the optimizing process. However, in some settings undesired
behaviors would happen, e.g., failing to convergence and generat-
ing low quality data. These problems mainly result from the use of
weight clipping to satisfy the Lipschitz constrain which is a require
of WGAN to function properly. Specially, the measure of weight
clipping would cause WGANs working as simple functions, and in
this way some complex data samples can not be fitted by the sim-
ple approaches. Besides, weight clipping restricts the weights of
each layer in a small range which may lead to gradients vanish-
ing or exposing easily. Therefore, in [26], Wasserstein GAN gradient
penalty(WGAN-GP) is proposed, which improve the value function
of WGAN and use the measure of gradients penalty to satisfy the
Lipschitz constrain instead of weight clipping. The value function
of WGAN-GP is as follows:
 
E [D(x )] − E [D(x˜)] − λ E ∇xˆ D(xˆ) − 1 2 (3)
x∼Pr x˜∼Pg xˆ∼Pxˆ
2
     
origanal wgan the penalty term
From Eq. (3), it can be seen that the main difference from the
WGAN algorithm is the last term. It is the new added penalty term,
in which λ is the penalty coefficient and the xˆ stands for the sam-
ples on all the straight lines between distribution Pg and Pr . Gen-
erally, 1-Lipschitz function refers to the function whose gradient
norm is at most 1. However, in Eq. (3) the penalty term penal-
izes the gradient norm which is away from 1, and makes all gra-
dient norms go towards to 1, experimentally bringing out a faster
convergence and better optimal results. Empirically, this is because
the fact that when the discriminator of WGAN is optimized it is
(2) almost unit gradient norm in distribution Pg and Pr . In practice,
The WGAN-GP algorithm has faster convergence, much more sta-
ble training process even with untuned default parameters and not
carefully designed architecture, along with high-quality samples.
490 X. Gao, F. Deng and X. Yue / Neurocomputing 396 (2020) 487–494
Table 1
The experimental environment.
Experimental tool Version number
Computer System Windows 7 (64-bit)
CPU Intel I5
Python 3.5.2 (in Anaconda 4.2.0)
tensorflow 1.4.0
numpy 1.13.3
matplotlib 1.5.3
Table 2
Descriptions of the toy dataset.
Category No.of each category Category description (the quality score)
1 1457 5
2 2198 6
3 880 7 Fig. 1. The flowchart of the comparative experiments.
As this paper focuses on the fault diagnosis and the data sam-
ple in this field are not as intuitive and straight forward as the im-
ages, therefore the meaningful loss functions of WGAN is needed
to help generate high-quality samples and determine the conver-
gence. Besides, WGAN-GP has the advantages of much more stable
optimizing process and is suitable for more wide application archi-
tectures and datasets. Therefore, in this paper, WGAN-GP is chosen
as the basic tool to help realise and improve the fault diagnosis
ability.
4. Experiments and results discussion
In order to evaluate the ability of WGAN-GP based data aug-
mentation scheme to improve fault diagnosis performance, com-
parative experiments are conducted in this paper and various com-
monly used classifiers are involved, i.e., logistic regression classifier
using stochastic gradient decent (SGD-LR), random forest classifier
(RF), and boosting tree classifier (BT).
The experimental environment is listed the Table 1. Since the
main purpose of this paper is to explore the ability of WGAN-GP
based augmentation to help classification tasks, it worths to men-
tion that the parameters of the classifiers in the tests are all the
default ones without any optimizations. Besides, as mentioned in
Section 3.2, the performance of WGAN-GP algorithm has less re-
lationship with the special model structure used [26], thus to be
more convenient and easier to handle, in the experimental part of
this paper, both the generator and discriminator of WGAN-GP are
multilayer perceptrons.
4.1. Datasets
In our experiments, at first, two benchmark datasets from UCI
repository are chosen and tested for classification tasks. The first
dataset is considered a toy data sets about wine qualityidentifica-
tion, in which 3 categories are chosen to use in this paper. The
other one is the fault diagnosis dataset (FD dataset). Specially, it
is a steel plates faults dataset. The detailed information about the
datasets are listed in the Tables 2 and 5.
Note that the distributions of data samples in the both datasets
are all imbalanced, for example, in the toy dataset, the 3 cate-
gories have 1457, 2198, 880 samples, respectively. With the imbal-
anced distribution, generally the accuracies of classifiers would be
affected, sometimes even misclassification happens. This is because
the categories with low-data would easy to be neglected and sub-
merged by the majority class. Therefore, to make full use of the
imbalanced dataset, GAN based data augmentation is conducted.
Besides, a universal industrial simulation banchmark of fault di-
agnosis and process monitor, i.e., Tennessee Eastman Process, is
used to further testify the proposed data augmentation scheme can
improve the classification accuracy and help industrial fault diag-
nosis.
4.2. Experiments
To assess the GAN based data augmentation scheme to the un-
balanced dataset for helping faults classification, the straight for-
ward method is filling the generated data into the original data set
and then comparing the classification results.
At first, the classifiers are trained on the original dataset and
the classification accuracies are recorded. Note that, these accu-
racies are recognised as the baselines in the comparative experi-
ments. After that, the categories with less data samples are chosen
as the target categories to be supplemented. Then, the WGAN-GP
based model is trained using the given data samples of the target
categories. Due to the interpretability between the loss function
and the generated data in WGAN-GP, after some iterations, when
the loss of the discriminator in WGAN-GP comes to convergence
and falls into a low value range, the generated data samples are
of the high quality. The training details of the WGAN-GP, including
the hyperparamaters can be shown in the following list.
The training details of WGAN-GP
– Batch size 40
– Learning rate 0.0 0 0 05
– Training epoch 500
– Leaky ReLU 0.3
– Adam optimizer beta1=0.5
– Data normalization −1 ∼ 1
Since then the generated data should begin to be collected and
then added into the original dataset, forming the new dataset. At
last, the same classifiers are trained by putting in the new dataset
and the results are recorded too. Fig. 1 shows the flowchart of the
comparative tests, where test result 1 refers to the accuracies of
all the classifiers on the original dataset while result 2 means the
accuracies on the new dataset (the original data mixed with the
WGAN-GP generated ones).
Specially, in the baseline experiment, the original data are di-
vided into 4 parts, in which 3 parts are served as training data
and the last one is used as testing data. On the other hand, in
the comparative experiment, the new data samples generated by
the WGAN-GP based model are added into the training data while
the testing data keep the same as in the baseline experiment. In
this way, a comparison is made between the accuracies of all the
classifiers on the original dataset and the accuracies on the new
dataset (combined with the WGAN-GP generated ones). By the
way, the accuracy mentioned here means the percentage of the
correctly predicted samples in all samples of the testing set and
 X. Gao, F. Deng and X. Yue / Neurocomputing 396 (2020) 487–494 491

Table 3
The performance of classifiers in original data and mixed data for toy dataset.

Classifier Accuracy(%) and random seed=0 Accuracy(%) and random seed=1 Accuracy(%) and random seed=2

Original data Mixed dataset Original data Mixed dataset Original data Mixed dataset
SGD-LR 48.30 49.27 47.52 48.30 48.06 48.74
RF 68.53 98.79 68.43 98.81 68.34 98.86
BT 63.14 65.59 63.14 65.59 63.14 65.60

Table 4
The improved accuracy in the comparative test.

Classifier Accuracy(%) Accuracy(%) Accuracy(%)

random seed=0 random seed=1 random seed=2

SGD-LR 0.70 0.78 0.72

RF 30.26 30.38 30.49
BT 2.45 2.45 2.46

Table 5
Descriptions of the FD dataset.

Category No. of each category Category description

1 391 K Scratch
2 402 Bumps
3 673 Other Faults

Fig. 2. The loss curves of discriminator of WGAN for the toy dataset.
it can be formulated as follows.
N
Accuracy = × 100%
N ment and the comparative experiment, 3 random seeds are set. It
where N is the quantity of testing data correctly predicated and N
is the quantity of all testing data.
4.3. Case 1: the toy dataset
In this paper, at first, a wine quality identification dataset ob-
tained from UCI data base is used, of which 3 categories are se-
lected and then served as the toy dataset. This dataset is supplied
by university of Minho, and the details, including the descriptions
and sample number of each category, are presented in Table 2. In
this set each sample has 11 physicochemical attributes to describe
its quality, such as fixed acidity, volatile acidity, citric acid, residual
sugar and so on.
The accuracies of the classifiers on the original dataset are the
baselines and as for the toy data, the result are recorded in Table 3.
Note that in the table each accuracy value is the average value of
100 corresponding tests.
Since the unbalanced distribution of dataset would affect the
classification, the WGAN-GP based model is trained to generate
similar data samples to add into the target categories and bal-
ance the whole dataset. When the category 1 of the toy dataset is
the target category and new data samples will be generated, the
curve in Fig. 2 shows the changing of the exact value of the loss
function in the discriminator in WGAN-GP and it also can been
seen that after 230th iteration the value comes to convergence.
Therefore, the to be used generated data samples are collected af-
ter 230th iterations. Finally, for the toy dataset, 1200 samples in
the 3th category and 500 samples in the 1th category are gen-
erated, making all the classes of the toy data owning the similar
numbers of data samples, and then they are putted into the origi-
nal dataset to train the classifiers. The results of classifiers in this
test are listed in Table 4. As the same with the baseline experi-
ment, in this table each accuracy value is also the average value of
100 corresponding tests.
By comparing the results in Table 3, the Table 4 is made, which
shows the improved accuracies in the comparative experiments
after adding the generated data samples. It is clear that the accura-
cies of all the classifiers are raised and the results of the classifiers
based on RF improves greatly, which also show this classifier may
have better classification ability. Note that in both baseline experi-
(4)
is used to show that despite the small improvement of the accura-
cies for the classifiers based on SGD-LR and BT, it is also benefited
from the added data samples rather than the random factors. It
is clear that the changes caused by random factors are very small,
and even the biggest one is less than 0.50% while the improved ac-
curacies by the WGAN-GP based data augment model are all more
than 2.45%. Therefore, the WGAN-GP based data augment model is
validated the ability to generate reliable data samples for the low
data region to help classification tasks.
4.4. Case 2: the FD dataset
In this case, a steel plates faults data set is researched, which is
obtained from UCI Repository and supplied by Research Center of
Sciences of Communication in Italy. In this dataset, each record has
27 indicted variables to describe the fault type of a stainless steel
leaf, including pixels areas, sum of luminosity, steel plate thickness,
etc., [27] and in this paper 3 different typologies of faults are used.
The details of the dataset are listed in Table 5.
In the FD dataset, when generating new data samples for the
category 1, the changing loss curve of the generator and dis-
criminator in WGAN-GP are shown in Figs. 3 and 4, respectively.
Fig. 3 shows the loss value of generator is much easier to reach
0. In addition, in Fig. 4 the value comes to convergence to 0 after
210th iteration and it means discriminator can not figure out fake
data and real data. Thus, after 210th iteration the generated data
are collected as the to be used generated data samples. Finally,
280 samples in the 1th category are generated and for the 2th
category the same numbers of new samples are generated, mak-
ing each class in the FD data set owning the similar numbers of
data samples. Then they are putted into the original dataset and
the combined set serves as the training set for the classifiers.
Both of the accuracies of the classifiers on the original dataset
and the new combined data for the FD data are shown in Table 6.
Similar to the Case 1, each accuracy value in the table is also the
average value of 100 corresponding tests. It can be seen that in
492 X. Gao, F. Deng and X. Yue / Neurocomputing 396 (2020) 487–494

Table 6
The performance of classifiers in original data and mixed data.

Classifier Accuracy(%) and random seed=0 Accuracy(%) and random seed=1 Accuracy(%) and random seed=2

Original data Mixed dataset Original data Mixed dataset Original data Mixed dataset

SGD-LR 72.49 72.78 72.30 73.04 72.37 71.86

RF 80.61 99.32 80.97 99.26 80.79 99.27
BT 83.66 90.87 83.64 90.87 83.61 90.86

Table 8
Descriptions of 10 operating conditions in TE process.

Fault number Fault description

IDV0 Normal
IDV1 A/C feed ratio,B composition constant
IDV2 B composition,A/C ratio constant
IDV4 Reactor cooling water inlet temperature
IDV5 Condenser cooling water inlet temperature
IDV6 A feed loss (stream 1)
IDV7 C header pressure loss-reduced availability (stream4)
IDV8 A, B, C feed composition (stream 4)
IDV10 C feed temperature (stream 4)

ting and classification ability for multi-classification. Consequently,

Fig. 3. The loss curves of generator of WGAN for FD dataset.
in Case 2 even using data augment the classification accuracies
are only improved a little most time or even no improvement
seldomly. Nevertheless, all the great improved values for the RF
classifier and BT classifier as well as the small improved values
for SGD-LR classifier justified the effectiveness of the WGAN-GP
based data augment model. In a summary, the added new gen-
erated samples would improve the performance and increased the
accuracies generally. Therefore, the WGAN-GP based data augment
model is validated the ability to generate reliable data samples to
help classification tasks.

4.5. Case 3: Tennessee Eastman process

The Tennessee Eastman (TE) process is a simulation benchmark

of a real industrial chemical process, and it is universal as a widely
used platform for process monitoring and faults diagnosis, which is
composed of 5 major parts, i.e., the reactor, the product condenser,
a vapor-liquid separator, a recycle compressor, and a product strip-
per, and 52 variables are recorded. Besides, in the simulated pro-
Fig. 4. The loss curves of discriminator of WGAN for the FD dataset. cess, there are 21 operating conditions are set and for each fault
480 samples are in the training dataset. In this paper, to decrease
Table 7 calculating time and computing load, 10 operating conditions of TE
The improved accuracy in the comparative test. simulation process are used to testify the improvement of WGAN
Classifier Accuracy(%) Accuracy(%) Accuracy(%) based data augment for faults diagnosis and their detailed infor-
random seed=0 random seed=1 random seed=2 mation are shown in Table 8.
SGD-LR 0.29 0.74 −0.51 In this case, for each category, training data is used to train the
RF 18.71 18.29 18.48 WGAN-GP model. When the loss value of discriminator convergent
BT 7.21 7.23 7.28 to 0 and discriminator can not figure out fake data and real data
after several iterations, generated new data samples are collected.
Finally, 480 samples for the each category are generated, and then
this case the 3 different faulty conditions are relatively easy to they are putted into the original dataset, becoming the combined
recognised and the accuracies are relatively high compared with set to serve as the training set for the classifiers. Fig. 5. shows the
the Case 1. The differences of the accuracies of the classifiers on distribution of the first 3 principal components in origin data and
the original dataset and the new combined data are listed in the mixed data of fault IDV0, IDV1 and IDV2 after been dimensionally
Table 7, from which we can see that as for the RF classifier and reduced using the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm.
BT classifier the improved values is great after using data augment The performances of classifiers on the both original dataset and the
while for SGD-LR classifier the improved values is small. However, new combined data are shown in Table 9, and each accuracy value
in Table 7, it would be found that for SGD-LR classifier, when ran- in the table is also the average value of 100 corresponding tests. It
dom seed sets 2, the improved values is −0.51, which indicates should be note that from Case 2 in last subpart, SGD-LR classifier is
the fault diagnosis accuracy is no be improved. The main reason known unsuitable for multi-class classification and have no enough
is that the SGD-LR classifier is built for binary classification rather fitting and classification ability for multi-classification. Since there
than multi-class classification and thus it may have no enough fit- are 10 categories in this case, then SGD-LR classifier is substituted
 X. Gao, F. Deng and X. Yue / Neurocomputing 396 (2020) 487–494
Fig. 5. The distribution of the first 3 principal components in origin data and mixed data of fault IDV0, IDV1 and IDV2 after been dimensionally reduced using PCA.
Table 9
The performance of classifiers in original data and mixed data for TE process.
Classifier Accuracy(%) and random seed=0
Original data Mixed dataset
RF 94.45 100
BT 96.04 99.90
GBC 98.88 99.54
by Gradient Boosting classfier (GBC), which has wonderful classifi-
cation ability and fit for multi-class classification. From Table 9 we
can see that as for all the classifiers, i.e., the RF classifier, BT classi-
fier and GBC classifier, the fault diagnosis accuracies are improved
after using data augment and this justifies the effectiveness of the
WGAN-GP based data augment model to generate reliable data
samples to help classification tasks.
5. Conclusion
As is common that in fault diagnosis field the obtained data
is limited or usually in imbalanced distributions, the identification
and detection of faults would be difficult. Therefore, in this paper,
a WGAN-GP based data augmentation approach is used to generate
data samples to supplement low-data input set to improve the per-
formance of fault diagnosis in which the data manifold is accom-
plished in real sense with more stable process and high-quality
generated samples. Besides, to evaluate the scheme, three bench-
mark datasets are used in the testing experiments in this paper.
The results demonstrated fault diagnosis accuracies are increased,
showing the generated data by the proposed WGAN-GP based data
augmentation approach could help generalization capacity of the
classifiers on testing dataset and help the classification task.
Though added new generated samples would improve the per-
formance and increased the accuracies generally, the more com-
puting load and calculating time is used. Besides, the WGAN-GP
based data augment model is validated the ability to generate reli-
able data samples to help classification tasks, however, when clas-
sifier used have no enough fitting and classification ability, even
data augment is used the classification accuracies are only im-
proved a little most time or even no improvement. On the other
hand, due to the powerful fitting ability, the DNN based classi-
fiers are excepted to be used to identify faults in industrial pro-
cess with potential performance. However, quantities of layers are
in DNN means quantities of parameters in classifiers are to be de-
fined. Therefore, in the future, the authors will be devoted to the
improvement of the GAN based data augmentation scheme to suit
for the DNN based classifiers with larger size data to improve the
classification accuracy.
493
Accuracy(%) and random seed=1 Accuracy(%) and random seed=2
Original data Mixed dataset Original data Mixed dataset
94.47 100 94.47 100
95.99 99.91 96.05 99.93
98.77 99.91 98.876 99.539
Conflict of interest
None.
Acknowledgment
This research was supported by the Beijing NOVA Program
xx2016B027. The first authors would like to express a special ac-
knowledgement to International Graduate Exchange Program of
Beijing Institute of Technology for partly funding this paper.
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Xin Gao received the B.E. degree in automation from

North China Electricity Power University, Baoding, China,
in 2013, and the M.E. degree in control theory and con-
trol engineering from Bohai University, Jinzhou, China, in
2016. Now she is pursuing the Ph.D. degree in School of
Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.
Her research interests include data-driven fault detection,
diagnosis and prediction.