An Ensemble-Based Approach to Anomaly Detection in Marine Engine Sensor Streams for Efficient Condition Monitoring and Analysis

This study proposes an unsupervised anomaly detection method using sensor streams from the marine engine to detect the anomalous system behavior, which may be a possible sign of system failure. Previous works on marine engine anomaly detection proposed a clustering-based or statistical control chart-based approach that is unstable according to the choice of hyperparameters, or cannot fit well to the high-dimensional dataset. As a remedy to this limitation, this study adopts an ensemble-based approach to anomaly detection. The idea is to train several anomaly detectors with varying hyperparameters in parallel and then combine its result in the anomaly detection phase. Because the anomaly is detected by the combination of different detectors, it is robust to the choice of hyperparameters without loss of accuracy. To demonstrate our methodology, an actual dataset obtained from a 200,000-ton cargo vessel from a Korean shipping company that uses two-stroke diesel engine is analyzed. As a result, anomalies were successfully detected from the high-dimensional and large-scale dataset. After detecting the anomaly, clustering analysis was conducted to the anomalous observation to examine anomaly patterns. By investigating each cluster’s feature distribution, several common patterns of abnormal behavior were successfully visualized. Although we analyzed the data from two-stroke diesel engine, our method can be applied to various types of marine engine.