An explainable artificial intelligence methodology for hard disk fault prediction

Abstract

Failure rates of Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) are high and often due to a variety of different conditions. Thus, there is increasing demand for technologies dedicated to anticipating possible causes of failure, so to allow for preventive maintenance operations. In this paper, we propose a framework to predict HDD health status according to a long short-term memory (LSTM) model. We also employ eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) tools, to provide effective explanations of the model decisions, thus making the final results more useful to human decision-making processes. We extensively evaluate our approach on standard data-sets, proving its feasibility for real world applications.