An artificial neural network supported stochastic process for degradation modeling and prediction

An artificial neural network supported stochastic process for degradation modeling and prediction is proposed in this paper. An artificial neural network is applied to describe the degradation path due to data fitting flexibility and path description considering degradation path uncertainty. The assumption that the initial degradation is zero in the stochastic process is freed. The artificial neural network supported stochastic process is trained by minimizing the minus log-likelihood offline-based on the run-to-failure degradation data. Considering unit-to-unit variance in population degradation modeling, the process parameters are assumed to be randomly distributed. Here, three common distributions describe the process parameters, and Akaike information criteria applied to select distributions of process parameters. The process parameters are evaluated by Bayesian inference based on the trained path, and distributions of process parameters are based on real-time degradation data for online prediction. The proposed method is verified by a simulation experiment based on a Wiener process, which seemed a true model. Furthermore, an actual degradation dataset is also applied to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Both the simulation experiment and actual example indicate that the proposed stochastic process is capable of degradation modeling and degradation predicting, even without prior information about the degradation path.