UMAP-Based All-MLP Marine Diesel Engine Fault Detection Method

This study presents an innovative approach for marine diesel engine fault detection, integrating unsupervised learning through Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) dimensionality reduction with time series prediction, offering significant improvements over existing methods. Unlike traditional model-based or expert-driven approaches, which struggle with complex nonlinear systems, or supervised data-driven methods limited by scarce labeled fault data, our unsupervised method establishes a normal operational baseline without requiring fault labels, enhancing applicability across diverse conditions. Leveraging UMAP’s nonlinear dimensionality reduction, the proposed method outperforms conventional linear techniques (e.g., PCA) by amplifying subtle system anomalies, enabling earlier detection of state transitions—up to two batches before deviations appear in traditional performance indicators (Ps)—thus improving fault detection sensitivity. To address nonlinear relationships in UMAP-reduced dimensions, the proposed TimeMixer-FI model enhances the TimeMixer architecture with MLP-Mixer layers. The TimeMixer-FI model demonstrates consistent improvements over the original TimeMixer across various sequence lengths, achieving an MSE reduction of 69.1% (from 0.0544 to 0.0168) and an MAE reduction of 46.3% (from 0.1023 to 0.0549) at an input sequence length of 60 time steps, thereby enhancing the reliability of the time series prediction baseline. Experimental results validate that this approach significantly enhances both the sensitivity and accuracy of early fault detection, providing a more robust and efficient solution for predictive maintenance in marine diesel engines.