Global dynamic features and information of adjacent hidden layer enhancement based on autoencoder for industrial process soft sensor application

Abstract There is a lack of consideration of temporal and spatial correlation in the process variables and adjacent hidden layers correlation in the soft sensor model of stacked autoencoders. To address the issue, a novel global dynamic adjacent layer information enhancement auto encoder (GD‐ALIEAE) method is proposed to improve the poor prediction performance. The gated recurrent unit (GRU) and uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) are applied to the GD‐ALIEAE model for obtaining global dynamic features of the temporal and spatial information of process variables by parallel computation. An adjacent layer information correlation algorithm is proposed to avoid the loss of hidden layers information during the stacking process. The algorithm enhances the features of the low layer through nonlinear mapping, combining the low layer and its adjacent layer as input. The input then is fed to the multi‐head attention mechanism to obtain features that contain adjacent layer correlation. Finally, a prediction model is established through a fully connected layer. Through simulation experiments on two industrial cases of sulphur recovery unit and thermal power plant, and compared with models of stacked autoencoder (SAE), stacked isomorphic autoencoder (SIAE), and target‐related stacked autoencoder (TSAE), the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified.