Visualisation of high dimensional data by use of genetic programming: Application to on-line infrared spectroscopy based process monitoring

Abstract

In practical data mining and process monitoring problems high-dimensional data has to be analyzed. In most of the cases it is very informative to map and visualize the hidden structure of complex data in a low-dimensional space. Industrial applications require easily implementable, interpretable and accurate projection. Nonlinear functions (aggregates) are useful for this purpose. A pair of these functions realise feature selection and transformation but finding the proper model structure is a complex nonlinear optimisation problem. We present a Genetic Programming (GP) based algorithm to generate aggregates represented in a tree structure. Results show that the developed tool can be effectively used to build an on-line spectroscopy based process monitoring system; the two-dimensional mapping of high dimensional spectral database can represent different operating ranges of the process.