Feature Importances as a Tool for Root Cause Analysis in Time-Series Events
Résumé
In an industrial setting, predicting the remaining useful life-time of equipment and systems is crucial for ensuring efficient operation, reducing downtime, and prolonging the life of costly assets. There are state-of-the-art machine learning methods supporting this task. However, in this paper, we argue, that both efficiency and understandability can be improved by the use of explainable AI methods that analyze the importance of features used by the machine learning model. In the paper, we analyze the feature importance before a failure occurs to identify events in which an increase in importance can be observed and based on that indicate attributes with the most influence on the failure. We demonstrate how the analyses of Shap values near the occurrence of failures can help identify the specific features that led to the failure. This in turn can help in identifying the root cause of the problem and developing strategies to prevent future failures. Additionally, it can be used to identify areas where maintenance or replacement is needed to prevent failure and prolong the useful life of a system.