Assistance Method for the Application-Driven Design of Machine Learning Algorithms

Machine learning (ML) offers a lot of potential for applications in Industry 4.0. By applying ML many processes can be improved. Possible benefits in production are a higher accuracy, an early detection of failures, a better resource efficiency or improvements in quantity control. The use of ML in industrial production systems is currently not widespread. There are several reasons for this, among others the different expertise of data scientists and automation engineers. There are no specific tools to apply ML to industrial facilities neither guidelines for setting up, tuning and validating ML implementations. In this paper we present a taxonomy structure and according method which assist the design of ML architectures and the tuning of involved parameters. As this is a very huge and complex field, we concentrate on a ML algorithm for time series forecast, as this can be used in many industrial applications. There are multiple possibilities to approach this problem ranging from basic feed-forward neural networks to recurrent networks and (temporal) convolutional networks. These different approaches will be discussed and basic guidelines regarding the model selection will be presented.The introduced assistance method will be validated on a industrial dataset.