Deep state space models for remaining useful life estimation

Deep learning has been used to train neural networks to estimate the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of a machine given sensor signals from that machine. This has resulted in some accurate state-of-the-art RUL estimation models. Here we present a novel way to construct a generative model to estimate the RUL and quantify its uncertainty. It takes the form of a Linear Gaussian State Space Model (LGSSM) and is trained using the Kalman Filter; hence, uncertainty is quantified using this LGSSM instead of by other popular methods like Monte Carlo Dropout or Deep Ensembles. This means we can train by directly using the marginal log-likelihood loss and don’t require multiple samples to represent the uncertainty. However, this method is limited to using Gaussian distributions to quantify uncertainty. We avoid needing to use non-linear variants of the filter by processing the sensors using a neural network to represent noncausal sensor sequences as a “control variable” in the LGSSM. This noncausal representation is shown to be important for achieving state-of-the-art performance. The model is tested on a turbofan engine and dust filter dataset. The code can be found on GitHub.