Fault diagnosis in industrial chemical processes using optimal probabilistic neural network

For fault detection and diagnosis in large‐scale industrial systems, traditional methods have a low classification accuracy, which is an issue. This paper proposes a fault diagnosis method based on the modified cuckoo search algorithm (MCS) to optimize the probabilistic neural network (PNN). The random forest treebagger (RFtb) is used to reduce the data feature and the PNN is trained for fault diagnosis and classification. However, in order to address the problem that the parameters of PNN easily fall into the local optimal value, the MCS algorithm is introduced to globally optimize the hidden layer element smoothing factor (σ) in the PNN. The MCS algorithm uses a parameters update and a better optimization mechanism to achieve excellent global convergence and to effectively improve the fault diagnosis capability of the model. During the testing process using the Tennessee Eastman (TE) process dataset, the performance of the proposed model is assessed by comparing the accuracy and the F 1 ‐score of different methods. Graphs are presented that depict fault classification and diagnostic results for the different models. The results show that the MCS algorithm has a better optimization ability than the traditional optimization algorithm and the proposed combination method can significantly improve the accuracy of the TE process fault diagnosis.