Guided Exploration of Industrial Sensor Data

Abstract

In recent years, digitization in the industrial sector has increased steadily. Digital data not only allows us to monitor the underlying production process using machine learning methods (anomaly detection, behaviour analysis) but also to understand the underlying production process. Insights from Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) play an important role in building data‐driven processes because data scientists learn essential characteristics of the data in the context of the domain. Due to the complexity of production processes, it is usually difficult for data scientists to acquire this knowledge by themselves. Hence, they have to rely on continuous close collaboration with domain experts and their acquired domain expertise. However, direct communication does not promote documentation of the knowledge transfer from domain experts to data scientists. In this respect, changing team constellations, for example due to a change in personnel, result in a renewed high level of effort despite the same knowledge transfer problem. As a result, EDA is a cost‐intensive iterative process. We, therefore, investigate a system to extract information from the interactions that domain experts perform during EDA. Our approach relies on recording interactions and system states of an exploration tool and generating guided exploration sessions for domain novices. We implement our approach in a software tool and demonstrate its capabilities using two real‐world use cases from the manufacturing industry. We evaluate its feasibility in a user study to investigate whether domain novices can reproduce the most important insights from domain experts about the datasets of the use cases based on generated EDA sessions. From the results of this study, we conclude the feasibility of our system as participants are able to reproduce on average 86.5% of insights from domain experts.