Effective Pattern Recognition of Control Charts Using a Dynamically Trained Learning Vector Quantization Network

Unnatural control chart patterns (CCPs) are associated with a particular set of assignable causes for process variation. Hence, effectively recognizing CCPs can substantially narrow down the set of possible causes to be examined, and accelerate the diagnostic search. Recently, machine-learning techniques, especially the artificial neural network (ANN), have been widely used as an effective tool for CCP recognition (CCPR) tasks. Most ANN applications in CCPR have been using static supervised ANNs, such as back propagation networks (BPNs) and learning vector quantization (LVQ) networks. The false recognition problem (i.e. the patterns are misclassified) commonly encountered for these ANN-based CCPR models is mainly due to the fact that the static ANNs cannot appropriately deal with dynamic patterns, such as CCPs. In this research, a dynamic training algorithm is designed to provide an LVQ network-based CCPR model the capability to on-line recognize the dynamic CCPs that vary over time. The numerical results using simulation show that the dynamically trained LVQ network-based model proposed in this research performs much better than other ANN-based models reported in literature with respective to recognition accuracy and speed. Although this research considers the specific application of a real-time CCPR model based on an LVQ network, the proposed dynamic training algorithm could be applied to CCPR systems based on other ANN architectures in general.