Simultaneous fault prediction in evolving industrial environments with ensembles of Hoeffding adaptive trees

Abstract

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) emerges as a critical task of Industry 4.0, driving operational efficiency, minimizing downtime, and reducing maintenance costs. However, real-world industrial environments present unsolved challenges, especially in predicting simultaneous and correlated faults under evolving conditions. Traditional batch-based and deep learning approaches for simultaneous fault prediction often fall short due to their assumptions of static data distributions and high computational demands, making them unsuitable for dynamic, resource-constrained systems. In response, we propose OEMLHAT (Online Ensemble of Multi-Label Hoeffding Adaptive Trees), a novel model tailored for real-time, multi-label fault prediction in non-stationary industrial settings. OEMLHAT introduces a scalable online ensemble architecture that integrates online bagging, dynamic feature subspacing, and adaptive output weighting. This design allows it to efficiently handle concept drift, high-dimensional input spaces, and label sparsity, key bottlenecks in existing PdM solutions. Experimental results on three public multi-label PdM case studies demonstrate substantial improvements in predictive performance of OEMLHAT over previous batch-based and online proposals for multi-label classification, particularly with an average improvement in micro-averaged F1-score of 18.49% over the second most-accurate batch-based proposal and of 8.56% in the case of the second best online model. By addressing a critical gap in online multi-label learning for PdM, this work provides a robust and interpretable solution for next-generation industrial monitoring systems for fault detection, particularly for rare and concurrent failures.