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ICT Express 7 (2021) 15–22
www.elsevier.com/locate/icte

Machine learning-based scheme for multi-class fault detection in turbine

engine disks
Carla E. Garcia, Mario R. Camana, Insoo Koo ∗
Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, University of Ulsan, Ulsan 680-749, South Korea
Received 30 November 2020; received in revised form 28 January 2021; accepted 28 January 2021
Available online 9 February 2021

Abstract
Fault detection of rotating engine components in the aircraft engine is a challenging task that must constantly be monitored to provide
aviation safety. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to detect in real time the degree of faults
in a turbine engine disk due to a crack. To further improve detection accuracy while reducing computational complexity, the recursive feature
elimination (RFE) is applied as a potent feature selection method. Satisfactorily, simulation results show that the proposed framework is
robust to changes in operating conditions and outperforms comparative approaches.
⃝c 2021 The Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences (KICS). Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access
article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Keywords: Turbine engine disk; Fault detection; Multi-layer perceptron (MLP); Recursive feature elimination (RFE)

1. Introduction testing, radiography testing and borescope inspection. The

Fault detection in rotating engine components is a research
topic widely applied in many practical engineering areas like
aviation safety, complex dynamic networks, and vehicular
networks. Detection of faults in turbine engine components is
needed in the aviation industry’s efforts to improve the work-
ing status of the turbine engine disk and ensure its efficient
running whose failures may lead to catastrophic events. Partic-
ularly, engine failures can jeopardize the security of an aircraft
in flight [1]. In this sense, identifying flaws in a rotating
turbine engine disk plays a key role in enhancing safety and
reducing maintenance costs for aircraft engines [2]. Although
a powerful detection monitoring system can be difficult to
implement due to the presence of ambient disturbance, scat-
tered loading conditions, crack sizes, and material properties.
Therefore, real-time fault detection mechanisms are desired
in order to provide robust responses to a changing operating
status subjected to variations [3].
Common current techniques for engine inspection are
magnetic particle inspection, eddy currents, liquid penetrant
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: carli.garcia27@hotmail.com (C.E. Garcia),
mario_camana@hotmail.com (M.R. Camana), iskoo@ulsan.ac.kr (I. Koo).
Peer review under responsibility of The Korean Institute of Communica-
tions and Information Sciences (KICS).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icte.2021.01.009
2405-9595/⃝ c 2021 The Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences (KICS). Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access
article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
advantages of these techniques are the capability to detect
normal and unusual discontinuities and the flexibility to be
used on various materials such as rubbers, plastics, and metals.
On the other hand, the drawbacks are its inspections costs,
and its operating is programmed using a schedule based on a
certain number of flight hours at regular intervals [4]. Induc-
tion thermography is another inspection approach for aircraft
engine that utilizes induction heating for faults detection in
conductive materials with the aid of infrared cameras to detect
the presence of temperature drops caused by flaws [5]. The
results showed that this technique requires a direct path from
the infrared camera to the flaw to achieve good detections.
Otherwise, a small diameter bolt hole can hardly be inspected.
The development of learning models for fault detection has
attracted the attention of the research community and the in-
dustry, which rely on the collection of normal and failure data
(or only normal data) to train computational fault detection
models [6–9]. In general, most of these models are created
by machine learning techniques [10,11] that help forecast
events, for example flaws, intrusion detection, surface crack
detection [12] and coverage prediction [13].
Conventional studies have focused on periodic checks and
scheduled maintenance, which have limitations in large struc-
tures, and must deal with several faults in unexpected engine
shutdowns [14]. Another approach is based on sensor systems
C.E. Garcia, M.R. Camana and I. Koo
that are capable of working under severe environmental con-
ditions. For instance, the authors in [15] and [16] proposed
sensor-based mechanisms by utilizing experimental measure-
ments obtained from the NASA Glenn Research Center’s
Rotor Dynamics Laboratory. Although a high-accuracy spin
system was used in [15] to collect the measurements, many
spins for the collected data were required to simulate different
conditions that an engine faces with real-time applications.
In [16], an inductive monitoring system (IMS), Orca, and
one-class support vector machine (OCSVM) algorithms were
studied to monitor a turbine engine-like rotor disk. The results
showed that the algorithms can predict anomalies in the disk
with the highest accuracy of 98.33% achieved by the Orca
algorithm.
Machine learning methods are data-driven when making
predictions. However, some datasets have useless information
that reduces the accuracy of the learning model. To tackle
this issue, methods for feature selection or dimensionality
reduction have been studied. For instance, in our previous
work [9], a binary particle swarm optimization (B-PSO) al-
gorithm was applied as a feature selection method to choose
useful features, instead of those that are redundant or useless
and that do not provide helpful information to detect faults
in turbine engine disks. The simulation results showed that
the proposed multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based scheme with
B-PSO achieved the highest accuracy for binary fault detection
prediction (i.e., normal or cracked) in comparison with bench-
mark schemes. In [12], a multiclass support vector machine
(MCSVM) was used to train the data with the best features
selected by the feature selection method named recursive
feature elimination (RFE). The results showed that the MCSM-
RFE framework achieves an accuracy that exceeds 95%. Chen
et al. proposed a combination of a kernel principal component
analysis (KPCA) method and K-nearest neighbors (KNN) to
reduce the quantity of redundant samples [17]. Subsequently,
this sample-reduction strategy can enhance the accuracy of
real-time fault detection in turbine engine disks. Furthermore,
the authors minimized the within-cluster distance and maxi-
mized the between-cluster distance in the feature space to fit
the model along with time, and to deal with different events
that a turbine engine disk could face. The results showed that
the sample-reduction technique enhanced accuracy for fault
detection in turbine engine disks. Similarly, in [18], the authors
proposed an adaptive Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based
fault detection method for rotating turbine engine disks, which
can be updated to time-varying process data. Experimental
results demonstrated that the GMM method outperformed the
classic GMM and multi-PCA baseline schemes. In [1], a sup-
port vector machine with a KNN-based method was applied
to fault detection of turbine engine disks. Experimental results
demonstrated the importance of a model that allows timely
updates according to the state of the rotating turbine engine
disk, since the yield of the conventional static model was
improved by applying an adaptive learning strategy. On the
other hand, a fault detection scheme was proposed in [19]
based on one-class large vector-angular region and margin
(one-class LARM), which provides a high accuracy rate with
few samples.
16
ICT Express 7 (2021) 15–22
Although the aforementioned works demonstrated they out-
perform baseline schemes, the proposed methods did not iden-
tify the severity level of the faults in a rotating turbine engine
disk, which can supply useful information to save mainte-
nance costs, plan precautionary measures, and enhance safety
monitoring through prompt reactions.
In the literature, artificial neural networks (ANN) have been
used in different scenarios for fault detection. For instance,
a damage detection of arch bridges using ANN was studied
in [20] for security and efficiency purposes in the transport
network. The results showed that ANN can foretell rib dam-
ages and column damages with 99% and 97% of accuracy,
respectively. In the context of crack or notch detection, in [21],
MLP was applied to detect a notch type damage in a thin
aluminum plate. As a result, the MLP classifier correctly
categorized the data into healthy and damaged groups with an
accuracy of 85%. In our previous work [9], an MLP-based
scheme with binary particle swarm optimization (B-PSO) was
proposed where B-PSO was applied as a feature selection
method to choose useful features. The results showed that
the MLP assisted by B-PSO achieved the highest accuracy
for binary fault detection prediction (i.e., normal or cracked)
in comparison with benchmark schemes. Different from the
previous work, we consider a multi-class classification scheme
based on MLP to categorize the level of the crack which
allows us to predict the failure at an early stage. Moreover, to
further improve the performance of the prediction, RFE-based
feature selection method is utilized to choose useful features,
instead of those which are redundant or useless and that do
not provide helpful information to detect faults in turbine
engine disks. To this end, RFE is one of effective approach
to feature selection which has been frequently applied in the
engineering field for fault detection purposes [9,22,23] by
ridding the least important features even for small-sample
feature selection [24].
Our main contributions are summarized as follows.
• A multi-class fault detection scheme for turbine engine
disks is investigated in this paper by applying the MLP-
based scheme to categorize a sample as normal or as
having a small crack or a large crack. Note that small
cracks and large cracks constitute fault samples that
allow us to determine the severity of the failure.
• In order to enhance the performance of our framework,
we propose RFE as a feature selection method, which
removes redundant and irrelevant features involved in
the dataset that do not provide useful information. This
technique reduces computational complexity while im-
proving prediction performance.
• We verify through simulation results that the proposed
MLP classifier with the RFE feature selection method
outperforms other benchmark approaches like B-PSO
and principal component analysis (PCA). Also, we com-
pared our propose MLP classifier algorithm with the
powerful random forest (RF), obtaining satisfactory re-
sults.
C.E. Garcia, M.R. Camana and I. Koo
Table 1
Recordings of the dataset [16].
Normal
3krpm-3-min-no-notch.xls
4krpm-3min-no-notch.xls
5krpm-3min-no-notch.xls
Table 2
Parameter descriptions [16].
Parameter name Description
Rev# Revolution measurement
SyncTime Clock time
RPM Measured RPM
MaxGap Maximum gap across all gap sensors
AvgGap Average gap across all gap sensors
MinGap Minimum gap across all gap sensors
Gap0 Measured gap for blade 0
... ...
Gap31 Measured gap for blade 31
Fig. 1. Test disk with a notch [16].
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The
system model and dataset are described in Section 2. The
proposed framework based on the MLP classifier and RFE
is briefly described in Section 3. The simulation results from
the proposed MLP classifier with RFE, and the results from
comparative approaches, are presented in Section 4. Finally,
the conclusion is presented in Section 5.
2. System model and dataset
We utilized a dataset from the Rotary Dynamics Laboratory
at the NASA Glenn Research Center [25] that was collected
using a physical simulator of turbine engine disks. This system
is based on a high-frequency tip clearance measurement to
predict disk faults by capturing tip timing measurements and
blade tip clearance in a rotating engine disk. The measure-
ments were taken by capacitive sensors which monitor the
capacitance electrical property, as shown in Fig. 1. Changes in
the distance between two surfaces steer to shifts in the capaci-
tance rate. The main idea is to detect any change in the center
of mass of the disk caused by a crack. A benchmark disk
and disks that have small and large cracks were introduced
to develop the crack detection scheme.
The dataset includes recordings, listed in Table 1, at three
different speeds in revolutions per minute (rpm) and in three
different states (normal, with a small crack, or with a large
ICT Express 7 (2021) 15–22
Small crack Large crack
3krpm-3min-notch-1.xls 3krpm-3-min-large-notch.xls
4krpm-3min-notch-1.xls 4krpm-3-min-large-notch.xls
5krpm-3min-notch-1.xls 5krpm-3-min-large-notch.xls
Units
integer
s
rpm
length
length
length
length
...
length
Fig. 2. Proposed MLP-RFE framework for multi-class fault detection of
turbine engine disks.
crack). All parameters are sampled once per revolution. On
each revolution, 32 blades are measured to edge clearances
which are shown in Table 2. Note that a crack causes minute
deformation in the engine disk as it rotates. Accordingly, a
speed-dependent shift is created by the deformation in the
disk’s center of mass. And that change can be detected by
analyzing the vibration whirl amplitude and phase as measured
by the blade tip clearance profile.
Note that the source of the turbine engine disk dataset used
in this paper did not quantify the small and large cracks. It
only provides information about the measures of the disk and
width of the crack of 0.381 mm without specifying values to
categorize the level of the faults. Nevertheless, the samples
in the dataset are labeled by faults include normal, small and
large cracks on the disk [3].
3. Proposed framework
The proposed multi-class scheme is composed of the MLP
classifier and the RFE method. We train the MLP model with
the best features chosen by the feature selection RFE method.
The proposed framework is illustrated in Fig. 2. First, we
apply the RFE-based feature selection method to the historical
dataset to train the model with useful features that help to
provide good accuracy for the predictions. Then, the MLP-
based scheme uses the historical training data to fit the model.
The objective of the MLP model is to forecast the degree of
the faults (normal, small crack, or large crack). A warning
will appear upon detection of small and large cracks. After a
certain number of samples α, the MLP model will be updated
17
C.E. Garcia, M.R. Camana and I. Koo ICT Express 7 (2021) 15–22

Algorithm 1: Recursive feature elimination algorithm.

inputs: Training dataset D = {(x1 , y1 ) , ..., (xr , yr )} with r
samples, where each { sample j =} 1, ..., r is composed of K
features, i.e. x j = x j,1 , ..., x j,K . An external estimator Ψ
and the required number of features to be selected, N ,
N < K.
Initialize counter z = 0.
Initial subset of features Ωz = { f 1 , ..., f K }, |Ωz | = K
while |Ωz | > N do
Train estimator Ψ with dataset D and the subset of
features Ωz . Measure the importance of each feature.
Increase the counter z = z + 1. Fig. 3. MLP classifier.
Remove the least important feature, f ∗ , to determine the
new subset Ωz = Ωz−1 − { f ∗ }, |Ωz | = |Ωz−1 | − 1.
end
Result: Final subset of N features, Ωz , to be used in the
training phase with the MLP-based scheme.

in a timely fashion with new samples to deal with real-

time applications, since the operating process of the turbine
engine disk will not remain constant [17]. One of the foremost
objectives of the proposed multi-class classification problem
is determine the level of the crack at an early stage in a real-
time fault detection. Therefore, once a small crack is identified,
the proposed MLP-RFE framework gives a warning as shown
in Fig. 2, and proper maintenance can be taken to prevent
that small crack from being enlarged over time. Moreover, we
evaluated the model by using 6000 samples for the testing set. Fig. 4. Validation scheme for tuning hyper-parameters.

3.1. Recursive feature elimination

RFE is a feature elimination method that evaluates how
well a specific feature contributes to classifying a sample from
among the different classes, and it removes less important
features to improve the accuracy. Feature selection methods
are popular in the literature because they reduce the compu-
tational complexity of the machine learning algorithms while
increasing the prediction performance [26,27]. RFE is based
on an iterative process that ranks the features according to a
measure of their importance [26]. To measure the importance
of each feature, RFE uses an external estimator that provides
weights to each feature. First, an external estimator is trained
with the current set of features, where the importance of each
feature is used to remove the least important ones from the cur-
rent set. Next, the iterative process is repeated until reaching
the required number of features. Algorithm 1 summarizes the
RFE procedure, where the estimator is denoted as Ψ . In this
paper, we use logistic regression [28] as an external estimator
to measure the importance of the feature, where these metrics
correspond to the coefficient values for each feature in logistic
regression.
3.2. Multi-layer perceptron classifier
MLP is characterized by various fully connected layers –
one input layer, one or more hidden layers, and one output
layer – as shown in Fig. 3.
18
The input data is fed into the input layer, and the outcome is
obtained through the output layer. The number of hidden layers
can vary according to the complexity required for our task and
in order to achieve better results. In this paper, we set the
hyper-parameters according to the analysis performed in the
proposed validation scheme shown in Fig. 4, where the dataset
is divided into training, validation, and testing data. To make
the proposed learning MLP model more robust, the training set
considers 500 samples at 3000 rpm and 4000 rpm, while the
validation set considers 900 samples at 3000 rpm, 4000 rpm,
and 5000 rpm. Accordingly, we established an MLP-based
scheme composed of one hidden layer with 100 neurons.
One hidden layer is a function, f : R N → R M , where
N represents the size of the input vector x j , and M = 3
represents the size of the output vector, f (x). Basically, f (x)
is a function that calculates the output for every neuron (from
the input layer, to the hidden layers, to the output layer) in
order to find the best approximation to that classifier while
learning the best parameters for it. In this paper, the output
can be one of the following classes: normal, crack, or large
crack. The procedure starts from the input weighting added
by weight and bias. Each node, apart from the input nodes,
has an activation function that describes the input/output re-
lations in a non-linear manner. In this paper, we use the
ReLU activation function. After that, the error is calculated
by comparing the output and the actual value. This error
C.E. Garcia, M.R. Camana and I. Koo ICT Express 7 (2021) 15–22

Fig. 6. Example instances at 3000 rpm.

Fig. 5. Datasets used in the experiments.

computes how much each neuron in the last hidden layer

contributed to each output neuron’s error. Then, the weights
are updated by a backpropagation method to reduce the error.
The backpropagation method measures the mistake gradient
across all the connection weights in the MLP by propagating
the error gradient backward in the network.
Accordingly, the output vector can be expressed in the
following matrix notation:
f (x) = Υ b(2) + W(2) (φ (x)) ,
( )
(1)
where b(2) is the bias vector, W(2) is the weight matrix between
the hidden and output layer, and Υ is the activation function Fig. 7. Example instances at 5000 rpm.
for the output layer. In this paper, we use a SoftMax activa-
tion function, since it is suitable for multi-class classification
purposes by assigning and all the features were standardized to zero mean and unit
( decimal probabilities to each class. The
vector φ (x) = g b(1) + W(1) x established for the hidden variance. In addition, the validation dataset and testing dataset
)

layer has the bias vector denoted as b(1) and the ReLU activa-
tion function denoted as g. The weight matrix, W(1) , connects
the input vector to the hidden layer.
4. Simulation results
In this section, we present the simulation results from using
the turbine engine disk dataset [25]. To perform the analysis,
we selected features based on revolutions per minute and the
measured gaps for blade 0 to blade 31, which is a total of 33
features for three different classes (normal, small crack, large
crack). The simulations were carried out on a computer with
16 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7-6700K CPU and by using
the scikit-learn library in the Anaconda environment.
From the dataset, we considered three different parts ac-
cording to the way in which the data are used: training,
validation, and testing. The training data are used to select the
best features through the RFE algorithm and to build the MLP
model. The validation data are used to select the best model
and to tune the hyper-parameters of the model, for instance
learning rate, batch size, number of hidden neurons, and so on.
The testing data are used to evaluate the final accuracy of the
trained model, and comprise data unseen during the training
process of the model. In the simulations, we used a training
dataset composed of 500 samples, where we only considered
samples for 3000 rpm and 4000 rpm for the three classes,
19
consisted of 900 and 6000 samples, respectively, in which
samples for 3000, 4000, and 5000 rpm were considered for
all three classes. Fig. 5 shows the distribution of the datasets
considered in this paper. It is noteworthy that the samples
at 5000 rpm are not used during the training phase and we
use this data to analyze the robustness of the model against
changes in the operational conditions.
Furthermore, we present an example of the classification
problem in Figs. 6 and 7, where the values of two features
and 3000 samples are considered to represent the class of each
sample for the 3000 rpm and 5000 rpm scenarios, respectively.
We can see that 5000 rpm is the most challenging scenario,
since the distribution of the data does not allow a linear
classifier. Therefore, we selected MLP, which is suitable for
data that are not linearly separable. Moreover, the selection of
the best features is a crucial factor to achieve high performance
from the predictions.
In this paper, we consider three metrics to analyze the
numerical results: accuracy, precision, and recall. Accuracy is
the ratio of correctly predicted samples to total samples and
evaluated over the testing data. The confusion matrix is defined
in Table 3, which allows us to visualize the performance of the
proposed scheme. Each row of the matrix represents the true
class, while each column represents a predicted class.
C.E. Garcia, M.R. Camana and I. Koo ICT Express 7 (2021) 15–22

Table 3
Confusion matrix.
Predicted class
Normal Small crack Large crack
Normal C11 C12 C13
True class Small crack C21 C22 C23
Large crack C31 C32 C33

Table 4
Feature selection analysis.
No. of features Accuracy (%) Precision (%) Recall (%)
2 99.830 99.831 99.830
3 99.799 99.800 99.789
4 99.998 99.998 99.998 Fig. 8. Batch size selection.
5 99.996 99.996 99.996
6 99.989 99.989 99.989
10 97.466 97.573 97.466

The precision and recall scores are evaluated in each class

based on the confusion matrix as follows:
Cii
Precisioni = ∑3 (2)
j=1 C ji
Cii
Recalli = ∑3 (3)
j=1 C i j

where i refers to each class with i = 1 for normal, i = 2 for

small crack and i = 3 for large crack. In addition, we use the
average precision and recall to simplify the comparison results. Fig. 9. Learning rate selection.

4.1. Tuning the hyper-parameters of the proposed model

The process to tune the hyper-parameters is based on the
scheme presented in Fig. 4. In the RFE algorithm, we used
logistic regression as an estimator to assign the coefficient of
the features for performing feature selection. Table 4 presents
the accuracy, precision, and recall scores for different num-
bers of features selected by the RFE algorithm. The selected
features depend on the training dataset and the parameters of
the RFE algorithm. From Table 4, we can see that selecting
four features permits us to achieve the highest performance
for the three considered metrics, and we selected these values
for further simulations. The selected features depend on the
training dataset and the parameters of the RFE algorithm. In
our simulation runs, the gap2, gap17, gap23 and gap31 are
selected when the target is to reduce the number of features
to four. The specific features names for 2 features are gap17
and gap31, for 3 features are gap2, gap17 and gap31, for
5 features are gap1, gap2, gap17, gap23 and gap31, for 6
features are gap1, gap2, gap17, gap19, gap23 and gap31, for
10 features are RPM, gap1, gap2, gap3, gap17, gap18, gap19,
gap23, gap30 and gap31.
In addition, we considered the following parameters for the
MLP-based scheme: a learning rate of 0.001, a batch size of
128, one hidden layer with 100 hidden neurons, a ReLU as an
activation function, and 50 epochs. Next, we justify the values
of the hyper-parameters for the MLP model.
20
Fig. 8 shows the average accuracy in terms of the number of
epochs for different batch sizes. Observe that the highest accu-
racy is achieved with a batch size at 128 while providing fast
convergence. Fig. 9 illustrates the average accuracy in terms
of the number of epochs with different values for learning
rate and hidden neurons, where we denote the learning rate
parameter as lr and the number of hidden neurons as HN. We
can see that the algorithm converges faster as the learning rate
increases. However, a high value for the learning rate can result
in low accuracy, for instance when the learning rate is 0.1.
In addition, we can see that higher accuracy and relatively
fast convergence are achieved with a learning rate at 0.001
with 100 hidden neurons, and by using ReLU as the activation
function.
4.2. Performance comparisons against the proposed model
In this subsection, we present simulation results from using
the testing dataset, which was not used in the training and
the hyper-parameter tuning process. For comparison purposes,
we considered B-PSO [9] as a comparative feature selection
algorithm, and PCA [29] as a comparative dimensionality
reduction technique. In addition, we compared the proposed
scheme with MLP without feature selection, and compared it
with the RF algorithm. The results were averaged over 100
independent repetitions while taking a different random subset
for the training dataset in each repetition.
C.E. Garcia, M.R. Camana and I. Koo ICT Express 7 (2021) 15–22

Table 5
Performance comparison for the fault classification problem.
Algorithm Accuracy (%) Precision (%) Recall (%)
RFE + MLP (proposed) 99.982 99.982 99.982
MLP 98.445 98.515 98.445
PCA + MLP 98.714 98.738 98.714
BPSO + MLP 92.795 94.005 92.795
PCA-RF 82.353 87.082 82.353
RF 95.310 95.888 95.310

Table 5 shows the accuracy, precision, and recall for the

proposed scheme and the comparison methods. For the com-
parison with PCA method, the highest accuracy was obtained
Fig. 10. Average accuracy in terms of the number of training samples.
with eight components and when the RF algorithm used 100
trees in the forest. Note that since traditional RF algorithm
does not permit an update of the splitting criteria when new
data arrive, the RF model is fixed in time. We can see that
the proposed scheme achieves the highest accuracy, precision,
and recall from among the comparison methods. In the paper,
the RFE-based scheme selected four features, from a total
of 33 features, as the best subset to train the MLP, which
allows reducing the number of weights to be optimized in
the backpropagation procedure of the MLP while reducing the
computational time.
Table 6 shows the precision and recall scores per class for
the proposed scheme and the baseline schemes. It is observed
that the proposed scheme provides the best performance for
the three classes: normal, N, small crack, SC, and large crack, Fig. 11. Average accuracy in each class.
LC. It is noteworthy that high precision in the normal class
means that small and large cracks were correctly detected
among the testing samples, i.e., no faulty disk was misclas- 5. Conclusion
sified as normal. Table 7 shows the normalized confusion
matrix for the proposed scheme, which allows us to visualize In this paper, we propose a novel approach of machine
the performance of the proposed scheme. Each row of the learning-based scheme named MLP aided by RFE technique
matrix represents the true class, while each column represents to detect in real time the degree of faults in a turbine engine
a predicted class. From Table 7, we can confirm that small- disk. Specifically, the proposed scheme is based on the RFE
crack and false-crack instances were not classified as normal technique for feature selection and the MLP model to classify
in any of the testing samples, i.e., a fault was always correctly normal disks versus disks with small cracks and large cracks.
detected. Feature selection analysis has validated the effectiveness of the
Fig. 10 illustrates the mean accuracy in terms of the number proposed FRE, which decreases the computational complexity
of training samples for the proposed and comparison schemes. while improving efficiency in predictions. In addition, the
We can see that the proposed scheme outperforms the compar- weights of the MLP-based scheme can be updated in timely
ison schemes when using 200 training samples while reaching fashion to deal with new conditions in a turbine engine disk.
stable accuracy after 300 training samples. Finally, Fig. 11 Simulations validate the superior performance of the proposed
shows the accuracy per class for the proposed and comparison scheme based on RFE and MLP, compared with the scheme
schemes, showing that the proposed scheme outperformed the without feature selection and the PCA and B-PSO techniques.
other methods in all the classes while achieving an accuracy In addition, we provide an analysis of the appropriate hyper-
of 100% with normal and small-crack classes. parameters settings that significantly improve the performance

Table 6
Precision and recall scores for the fault classification problem.
Alg. Prec. N Prec. SC Prec. LC Rec. N Rec. SC Rec. LC
RFE + MLP (prop) 100 99.95 100 100 100 99.95
MLP 100 95.54 100 98.19 100 97.14
PCA + MLP 97.02 99.20 100 100 96.92 99.22
BPSO + MLP 99.55 82.46 100 98.19 99.56 80.63
PCA-RF 96.90 66.26 98.08 64.75 96.63 85.68
RF 100 87.66 100 85.95 100 99.98

21
C.E. Garcia, M.R. Camana and I. Koo
Table 7
Normalized confusion matrix for the proposed scheme.
Predicted class
Normal Small crack Large crack
Normal 1 0 0 (ICTC), Jeju, South Korea, 2020, pp. 1–6.
True class Small crack 0 1 0 [10] Y. Freund, R.E. Schapire, Large margin classification using the
Large crack 0 0.00054 0.99947
and convergence of the proposed algorithm. Simulations re-
sults prove the robustness of the model since high accuracy
is achieved in the testing data, which contains samples of
5000 rpm that were not used in the training phase. Finally,
the proposed scheme was able to detect all the faults in the
testing dataset since there were no small-crack and large-crack
samples misclassified as normal.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Carla E. Garcia: Conceptualization, Methodology, Soft-
ware, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation,
Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Mario R.
Camana: Visualization, Data curation, Validation. Insoo Koo:
Resources, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project
administration, Funding acquisition.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing
financial interests or personal relationships that could have
appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the National Re-
search Foundation of Korea through the Korean Government
Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) under Grant NRF-
2018R1A2B6001714.
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