Feature Fusion to Increase the Robustness of Machine Learners in Industrial Environments

Industrial applications put special demands on machine learning algorithms. Noisy data, outliers, and sensor faults present an immense challenge for learners. A considerable part of machine learning research focuses on the selection of relevant, non-redundant features. This contribution details an approach to group and fuse redundant features prior to learning and classification. Features are grouped relying on a correlation-based redundancy measure. The fusion of features is guided by determining the majority observation based on possibility distributions. Furthermore, this paper studies the effects of feature fusion on the robustness and performance of classification with a focus on industrial applications. The approach is statistically evaluated on public datasets in comparison to classification on selected features only.