An attention transfer entropy based causality analysis with applications in rooting short-term disturbances for chemical processes.

The transfer entropy (TE) based causality analysis is able to provide a typical solution for fault rooting of industrial processes. However, short-term disturbances that occur during nominal operations of chemical processes are usually neglected because of the fixed time window of TE for global data distributions. Inspired by the selective attention idea, we propose attention transfer entropy (ATE) that helps to locate prominent targets. Concerning temporal features of industrial time series, prior knowledge is employed for constructing an interpretable model. We verify the reliability and effectiveness of the method with coal gasification process data. Additionally, the algorithm is compared to conventional causality analysis methods, proving that ATE enjoys excellent performances in rooting short-term disturbances with lower calculation burden.