Dimensionality reduction techniques (DR) enhance data interpretability and reduce space complexity, though at the cost of information loss. Such methods have been prevalent in the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) anomaly detection literature. While DR is favorable in supervised anomaly detection, where possible novelties are known a priori, the efficacy is less clear in unsupervised detection. In this work, we perform a detailed assessment of the DR performance trade-offs to determine whether the information loss imposed by DR can impact SHM performance for previously unseen novelties. As a basis for our analysis, we rely on an SHM anomaly detection method operating on input signals' fast Fourier transform (FFT). FFT is regarded as a raw, frequency-domain feature that allows studying various DR techniques. We design extensive experiments comparing various DR techniques, including neural autoencoder models, to capture the impact on two SHM benchmark datasets exclusively. Results imply the loss of information to be more detrimental, reducing the novelty detection accuracy by up to 60\% with autoencoder-based DR. Regularization can alleviate some of the challenges though unpredictable. Dimensions of substantial vibrational information mostly survive DR; thus, the regularization impact suggests that these dimensions are not reliable damage-sensitive features regarding unseen faults. Consequently, we argue that designing new SHM anomaly detection methods that can work with high-dimensional raw features is a necessary research direction and present open challenges and future directions. / M.S. / Structural health monitoring (SHM) aids the timely maintenance of infrastructures, saving human lives and natural resources. Infrastructure will undergo unseen damages in the future. Thus, data-driven SHM techniques for handling unlabeled data (i.e., unsupervised learning) are suitable for real-world usage. Lacking labels and defined data classes, data instances are categorized through similarities, i.e., distances. Still, distance metrics in high-dimensional spaces can become meaningless. As a result, applying methods to reduce data dimensions is currently practiced, yet, at the cost of information loss. Naturally, a trade-off exists between the loss of information and the increased interpretability of low-dimensional spaces induced by dimensionality reduction procedures. This study proposes an unsupervised SHM technique that works with low and high-dimensional data to assess that trade-off. Results show the negative impacts of dimensionality reduction to be more severe than its benefits. Developing unsupervised SHM methods with raw data is thus encouraged for real-world applications.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/110138 |
| Date | 19 April 2022 |
| Creators | Soleimani-Babakamali, Mohammad Hesam |
| Contributors | Computer Science, Lourentzou, Ismini, Fraghally, Mohammed Fawzi Seddik, Sarlo, Rodrigo |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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