Quality-related locally weighted soft sensing for non-stationary processes by a supervised Bayesian network with latent variables

Soft sensors are widely used to predict quality variables which are usually hard to measure. It is necessary to construct an adaptive model to cope with process non-stationaries. In this study, a novel quality-related locally weighted soft sensing method is designed for non-stationary processes based on a Bayesian network with latent variables. Specifically, a supervised Bayesian network is proposed where quality-oriented latent variables are extracted and further applied to a double-layer similarity measurement algorithm. The proposed soft sensing method tries to find a general approach for non-stationary processes via quality-related information where the concepts of local similarities and window confidence are explained in detail. The performance of the developed method is demonstrated by application to a numerical example and a debutanizer column. It is shown that the proposed method outperforms competitive methods in terms of the accuracy of predicting key quality variables.