Explainable deep transfer learning for energy efficiency prediction based on uncertainty detection and identification

Energy efficiency is an important aspect of increasing production capacity, minimizing environmental impact, and reducing energy usage in the petrochemical industries. However, in practice, data quality can be degraded by measurement malfunction throughout the operation, leading to unreliable and inaccurate prediction results. Therefore, this paper presents a transfer learning fault detection and identification-energy efficiency predictor (TFDI-EEP) model formulated using long short-term memory. The model aims to predict the energy efficiency of the petrochemical process under uncertainty by using the knowledge gained from the uncertainty detection task to improve prediction performance. The transfer procedure resolves weight initialization by applying partial layer freezing before fine-tuning the additional part of the model. The performance of the proposed model is verified on a wide range of fault variations to thoroughly examine the maximum contribution of faults that the model can tolerate. The results indicate that the TFDI-EEP achieved the highest r-squared and lowest error in the testing step for both the 10% and 20% fault variation datasets compared to other conventional methods. Furthermore, the revelation of interconnection between domains shows that the proposed model can also identify strong fault-correlated features, enhancing monitoring ability and strengthening the robustness and reliability of the model observed by the number of outliers. The transfer parameter improves the prediction performance by 9.86% based on detection accuracy and achieves an r-squared greater than 0.95 on the 40% testing fault variation.