Long Short-Term Memory Mixture Density Network for Remaining Useful Life Prediction of IGBTs

A reliable prediction of the remaining useful life of critical electronic components, such as insulated gate bipolar transistors, is necessary for preventing failures in many industrial applications. Recently, diverse machine-learning techniques have been used for this task. However, they are generally focused on capturing the temporal dependencies or on representing the probabilistic nature of the degradation of the device. This work proposes a neural network architecture that combines long short-term memory and mixture density networks to address both targets simultaneously when modeling the remaining useful life. The proposed model was trained and evaluated using a real dataset of insulated gate bipolar transistors, demonstrating a high capacity for predicting the remaining useful life of the validation devices. The proposed model outperformed the other algorithms considered in the study in terms of root mean squared error and coefficient of determination. In general terms, an average reduction of at least 18% of the root mean squared error was obtained when compared with the second-best model among those considered in this work, but in some specific cases, the root mean squared error during the prediction of remaining useful life decreased up to 21%. In addition to the high performance obtained, the characteristics of the network output also facilitated the creation of confidence intervals, which are more informative than solely exact values for decision-making.