Renewable Energy 206 (2023) 309–323

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Renewable Energy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/renene

Unsupervised anomaly detection using graph neural networks integrated

with physical-statistical feature fusion and local-global learning
Chenlong Feng a, Chao Liu a, b, *, Dongxiang Jiang a, c
a
Department of Energy and Power Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China
b
Key Laboratory for Thermal Science and Power Engineering of Ministry of Education, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China
c
State Key Laboratory of Control and Simulation of Power System and Generation Equipment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Efficient and feasible anomaly detection scheme that could utilize data collected by supervisory-control-and-
Wind turbine data-acquisition (SCADA) system is essential for wind turbines, which could greatly increase the amount of
Anomaly detection available condition monitoring data, and improve the power generation efficiency and reduce maintenance costs.
Feature fusion
While it is also very challenging as condition estimation with such massive field data is difficult to tackle,
Supervisory control and data acquisition
Graph neural networks
especially the SCADA data is not labeled in most cases. This work presents an unsupervised anomaly detection
framework for wind turbines incorporating physical-statistical feature fusion and graph neural networks (GNNs),
realizing dimensionality reduction, temporal dependence extraction, and latent nonlinear correlation capture of
high-dimensional data. Firstly, graphical modeling for SCADA data of wind turbines is presented. Secondly, the
physical-statistical feature fusion is implemented via local-global mutual information maximization. Finally,
anomaly detection is realized with an energy-based method to learn patterns in the updated nodes’ feature
matrix. The results show that i) the features designed by physical information can reasonably represent equip­
ment’s state and reduce the information-redundancy, ii) the time-series based graph structure can effectively
express the dataset structure information and extract temporal dependence, iii) and the anomaly detection model
can fully use the physical-statistical information and local-global information, which outperforms comparison
methods.

1. Introduction
Wind energy plays an essential role in the development of renewable
energy mostly because of its large amount of capacity and installation.
The global installed capacity of wind energy reached 743 GW by the end
of 2020, with a huge increase of 93 GW compared to 2019 [1]. In China,
the development of renewable energy, including wind energy, is more
aggressive in the era of “Carbon Peak and Carbon Neutrality” [2]. In this
context, the condition monitoring and anomaly detection of the newly
installed wind turbines as well as a large number of existing ones are
becoming more and more important in terms of optimizing the power
output of the wind energy and the maintenance of the systems.
Wind turbines are complex electro-hydraulic systems that operate
continuously under irregular load patterns, intermittent durations, and
inclement weather conditions [3]. Such changing and harsh operating
environments tend to cause irreversible damage to wind turbines,
resulting in kinds of failures [4]. The operation and maintenance (O&M)
issues for wind farms have drawn extensive attention under the cir­
cumstances [5]. Statistics show that the O&M costs of onshore wind
turbines account for 10%–15% of the total power generation cost, while
the proportion of offshore wind turbines is about 20%–25% [6,7]. High
O&M costs are extremely heavy burdens for wind farm operators.
Therefore, to detect anomalies in advance, and reduce abnormal
downtime and O&M costs, effective anomaly detection approaches for
wind turbines are critical for both academia and industry.
Currently, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems
are installed in most wind turbines, which are principally used for per­
formance monitoring via collecting various types of online wind turbine
operating data at a certain interval [8]. These data are usually with very
high dimensions (in terms of the number of variables monitored) and in
long-duration (in terms of the time of the records) [9], where there is
temporal dependence at each parameter [5] and strong nonlinear cor­
relations between parameters because of the interaction and depen­
dence between different components in a WT system [10]. The SCADA

* Corresponding author. Department of Energy and Power Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China.
E-mail address: cliu5@tsinghua.edu.cn (C. Liu).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2023.02.053
Received 10 June 2022; Received in revised form 9 February 2023; Accepted 12 February 2023
Available online 15 February 2023
0960-1481/© 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
C. Feng et al.
data is readily available for condition monitoring with no need for
additional data acquisition [11]. Thus, by developing data-driven based
anomaly detection algorithms based on SCADA data, the operating
condition of wind turbines can be monitored [9].
Intensive research has been conducted for anomaly detection of wind
turbines using SCADA data, among which deep learning frameworks
attracts more and more attention recently. Zhao et al. [12] proposed a
deep learning method for wind turbines based on a deep auto-encoder
(DAE) network and designed an adaptive threshold determined by the
extreme value theory as the rule of anomaly judgment to implement
early warning of fault components and deduce potential locations of a
faulted component. Similarly, Chen et al. [5] designed a stacked
denoising auto-encoders (SDAE) model with sliding windows and mul­
tiple noise levels for the construction of wind turbines’ normal behavior
model and then the quantification of abnormal levels is obtained by
evaluating the overlap between test distribution and baseline condition.
Chu et al. [9] proposed an anomaly detection framework for wind tur­
bines based on LSTM-AE using SCADA time series data, considering the
advantages of the LSTM in modeling temporal dependency hidden in
multidimensional sequential data and the ability of the AE effectively
extract data features. Xiang et al. [13] cascaded convolutional neural
network (CNN) and bidirectional gated recurrent units with attention
mechanism (BiGRU-AM) together to extract multidirectional spatio­
temporal features of SCADA data. The aforementioned detection algo­
rithms share the same assumptions for the inputs that the input nodes
(parameters) are assumed to be independent of each other, and the
latent structural information between data is ignored [14,15]. In other
words, the correlation between input data is not considered. Therefore,
the characteristic representation capacity of these methods is limited
and information (that probably improves the anomaly detection per­
formance) is not extracted and considered.
To solve the problem, a novel data structure considering data and the
relationships between data, i.e., graph, is introduced in the field of deep
learning, thus generating the graph neural networks (GNNs) with graph
data as input. Recent applications of GNNs in anomaly detections show
that the graph structure is beneficial as of its feature extraction between
the inputs (which is missed in the aforementioned deep learning ap­
proaches). Wang et al. [16] combined the powerful representation
ability of GNNs with the classical one-class objective to construct one
class graph neural network (OCGNN), a graph anomaly detection
framework, which aims at mapping the training nodes into a hyper­
sphere in the embedding space. For the rumor detection task, Bai et al.
[17] proposed an ensemble graph convolutional neural net (EGCN) by
designing a source-replies relation graph for each conversation and node
feature of word vectors. Xie et al. [18] constructed a novel anomaly
detection method for satellites based on a graph neural network and
dynamic threshold (GNN-DTAN) using telemetry time series data. In the
field of anomaly detection for wind turbines, Yu et al. [19] proposed a
new fast deep graph convolutional network to diagnose gearbox faults.
These graph-based deep learning networks can process the
non-Euclidean data and embed the graph information of data into net­
works to provide more prior knowledge for anomaly detection tasks,
thus improving the effect of anomaly detection [14].
In addition, a large amount of data collected by real SCADA systems
is not labeled due to the high costs of labeling [20,21], bringing out a
huge challenge to develop anomaly detection methods based on SCADA
data. Therefore, considering the advantages of GNNs and the limitations
of the SCADA data, unsupervised GNNs have attracted more and more
attention [22–27]. Note that the selection of objective functions to train
networks is a key problem for unsupervised algorithms. The purpose of
unsupervised networks is to train an encoder to learn useful represen­
tations [28], i.e., one that can be used to distinguish anomalous samples
correctly or contain the most unique information of samples, and
entirely by which these samples can be reconstructed. It means that
unsupervised networks should naturally consider preserving as much
information as possible within the imposed constraints under the
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Renewable Energy 206 (2023) 309–323
circumstance of not knowing what information to discard when training,
the idea of which was first proposed by Linsker in 1988, named the
InfoMax Principle [29]. The implementation of this principle is sup­
ported by mutual information, which is a useful information metric used
to capture nonlinear statistical dependencies between variables in in­
formation theory [30,31]. Therefore the unsupervised deep learning
methods based on mutual information maximization have attracted a lot
of attention in recent years [28,32–36]. The Deep InfoMax (DIM) [28]
and Deep Graph InfoMax (DGI) [32], as two typical unsupervised rep­
resentation learning methods based on mutual information maximiza­
tion, respectively train an encoder to maximize the mutual information
between the high-level global representation of an image or graph and
local representations.
Motivated by the achievements of these unsupervised learning
methods, we design graph nodes features and graph adjacency matrix
applicable to SCADA data for its characteristics of high-dimensional,
temporal-dependence and nonlinear-correlation, and apply the ideas
of unsupervised graph learning of DGI in this work, thus proposing an
anomaly detection framework for wind turbines based on physical-
statistical feature fusion and unsupervised GNNs (i.e., DGI). Firstly, a
method based on operating physical characteristics of wind turbines is
proposed to extract the features representing wind turbines’ state from
the perspective of the characteristic curve based, the normal behavior
model based and the relative temperature difference based, thus
obtaining the nodes feature matrix; Secondly, a time-series-based con­
struction method for the graph adjacency matrix with a sliding window
is designed to extract the temporal-dependence of SCADA data; Thirdly,
the nodes feature matrix and graph adjacency matrix is fed into the DGI
network, on the one hand, to capture the nonlinear characteristics, on
the other hand, to reduce the dimensionality of SCADA data through the
feature extraction idea based on physical-statistical feature fusion;
Finally, the updated nodes feature matrix is sent into anomaly detector,
i.e. the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM), to detect the abnormal
state of wind turbines according to the designed anomaly detection
rules.
The main contributions of this work are summarized as follows.
(i) To further represent and construct relationships between
different parameters in the SCADA dataset, a graphical modeling
method of time-series data for SCADA systems is proposed to
abstract the SCADA data as the combination of a graph nodes
feature matrix and a graph adjacency matrix.
(ii) To realize the dimensionality reduction, temporal dependence
extraction and nonlinear correlation capture for the SCADA
dataset, a physical-statistical feature fusion method based on
local-global mutual information maximization is designed.
(iii) The efficacy of the DGI’s encoder using the GAT is verified and
the feasibility of the anomaly detection approach using graph
neural networks and an energy-based model is validated through
actual fault cases in wind turbines.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section II,
preliminaries of GNNs and RBM are introduced. In section III, the GNNs
framework based on DGI-RBM is illustrated. In section IV, field SCADA
data is collected and fed into the DGI-RBM framework. The anomaly
detection results are obtained and compared with the ground truth.
Finally, the conclusions are summarized in section V.
2. Preliminaries
2.1. Graph and graph neural networks
2.1.1. Graph [37]
As typical non-Euclidean data, a graph is a language that can
describe complex things, and it has the characteristics of varying local
input dimensions and disordered node arrangement. Mathematically, a
C. Feng et al. Renewable Energy 206 (2023) 309–323

graph is represented as G = (V, E), where V is the set of nodes, and E is graph, while the weight to measure the information importance of nodes
the set of edges. Let vi ∈ V denote a node and eij = (vi , vj ) ∈ E denotes an depends on the nodes’ features. The introduction of the attention
edge pointing from vi to vj . The adjacency matrix A is an N× N matrix mechanism transforms the weights into parameters that can be learned,
with Aij = 1 if eij ∈ E and Aij = 0 if eij ∕
∈ E. Additionally, a node v in graph prompting the network to pay more attention to those nodes with
G can be represented by feature vector hv ∈ RF . Then the feature matrix greater impact and neglect some nodes with lesser impact according to
H for graph G, where H ∈ RN×F . the actual expression of nodes feature in the process of information
aggregation. The structure of the graph attention layer is shown in Fig. 1
2.1.2. Graph convolutional network (GCN) [37,38] (b). The updated nodes feature and the attention weight can be calcu­
From the perspective of how to define graph convolution, graph lated by Ref. [39]:
convolution networks fall into two categories: spectral-based and ⇀
′
(
∑ ⇀
)
spatial-based. This work only focuses on the basic principle of the hi = σ αi,j Whj (2)
spatial-based graph convolution network, which defines graph convo­ j∈N(i)

lution by information propagation and aggregation between nodes, ( ( [ ⃦ ]))

⇀⃦ ⇀
forming a new central node feature in this way. Taking a single-layer ⇀
LeaklyReLU a Whi ⃦
exp Wh
⃦ j
forward propagation graph convolution network as an example, its αi,j = ( ( [ ⃦ ])) (3)
⇀⃦ ⇀
propagation rules are as follows [38]: ∑ ⇀
exp LeaklyReLU a Whi ⃦⃦Whk
k∈N(i)
( ) ( − )
(1)
1/2 1/2
̂
H (l+1) = f H (l) , A = σ D ̂D
A ̂− H (l) W (l)
where, W is the parameter used to transform the dimension for nodes
where  = A + I is the adjacency matrix considering self-loop edge, I is feature; a is the weight vector parameter; ‖ denotes the concatenation of
⇀

̂ = ∑A
the unit matrix; the diagonal matrix D ̂ ij represents the degree of vectors; αi,j is the weight factor between node i and node j calculated
j
with a; LeaklyReLU( ⋅) is the leak correction linear unit; σ( ⋅) is the
⇀
each node in the graph (that is, the number of edges connected to the
nonlinear activation function. GAT aggregates neighbor nodes’ infor­
node); H(l) denotes the nodes feature matrix of layer l network; W(l) mation with parametrized weights (as shown in Eq. (3)) obtained by
denotes the weight matrix of layer l network; σ( ⋅) is nonlinear activation nodes’ features. Based on Eqs. (2) and (3), GAT can use the learned
function; H(l+1) = f(H(l) , A) is the output of layer l network, that is, the weight factor to update the nodes feature matrix.
updated nodes feature matrix.
Based on the above propagation rules, GCN can greatly improve the
breadth of information received by each node as the number of propa­ 2.2. Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) [40]
gation layers increases, obtaining more information about neighbor
nodes. Noted that to measure the information importance of different The Restricted Boltzmann machine is a probabilistic graph model
neighbor nodes, GCN uses D̂ − 1/2 to weight each node, which follows this based on energy estimation of the inputs, which can be used to extract
√̅̅̅̅ features of input data, as shown in Fig. 2. Given state vectors h and v, the
̂ larger, 1/ di smaller, thus the less important infor­
rule: when di ∈ D
energy function of RBM can be expressed as:
mation for the neighbor node connected to this edge. GCN aggregates
neighbor nodes’ information with nonparametric weights (αi,j = 1/ E(v, h) = − hT Wv − aT v − bT h (4)
1/2
(deg (vi )deg (vj )) ) obtained by the degree matrix, as shown in Fig. 1
(a). This deficiency will be remedied in GAT. where a is the bias vector of the visible layer, b is the bias vector of the
hidden layer, and W is the weight matrix connecting visible units with
2.1.3. Graph attention network (GAT) [38,39] hidden units.
Considering the limitation of measuring the information importance
of a node only by the structural information of the graph (degree ma­ 3. Methodology
trix), an attention mechanism is introduced into the process of propa­
gating neighbor nodes’ information, named graph attention network. In 3.1. Unsupervised anomaly detection framework
this network, the adjacency matrix is only used to define the nodes in a
An unsupervised anomaly detection framework based on Deep Graph

Fig. 1. Difference of edge weight between GCN and GAT.

311
C. Feng et al.
Fig. 2. RBM model.
InfoMax - Restricted Boltzmann Machine (DGI-RBM) is presented in this
work (shown in Fig. 3), in which the DGI is used to extract and aggregate
the nodes’ features (with the purpose that the nodes “close” in the input
graph are also “close” in the high-dimension feature space after merging
graph structure information), and RBM is used to evaluate nodes’ state
and detect anomalies. The steps of forming the anomaly detection
framework based on DGI-RBM include.
Phase 1. Data preprocessing. It is not conducive to learning the normal
behavior models if using the raw SCADA data, as the widely existing
outliers could be distractive for the modeling training, which is usually
the case with the field data due to lots of practical issues in the data
collection process. This work applies the mean root square method and
kernel density estimation method for data preprocessing, to remove the
outliers. Also, the raw dataset can be roughly separated into the normal
dataset and fault dataset. Note that the normal dataset and fault dataset
defined here are not strictly, some of the nominal data might mislabeled
as anomalous (vice versa), and it cannot be used in anomaly detection.
In this context, the normal data sent to the learning scheme in the follow
phases are mixed with nominal and anomalous ones (where we assume
that most of them are nominal). Therefore, the framework presented in
this work is unsupervised in terms without the needs of intensive and
human labeling in SCADA data.
Fig. 3. The proposed unsupervised anomaly detection framework based on DGI-RBM.
312
Renewable Energy 206 (2023) 309–323
Phase 2. Graphical modeling I - nodes definition (Feature extraction).
The nodes of the graphs are defined as the state of wind turbines at time
t. To form the feature vector for the node in the graphs, three types of
physics-based features reflecting the operating condition of wind tur­
bines are presented in this work, including the characteristics-curve-
based features, the normal-behavior-model-based features, and the
relative-temperature-difference based features. Details are described in
Section 3.2.1.
Phase 3. Graphical modeling II- edges definition. The graph adjacency
matrix is constructed following the definition in Section 3.2.2, in which
the influence of past nodes and future nodes on the current node is
considered, that is, a directed graph with a sliding window. The graphs
(nodes and edges) are defined via Phases 2 and 3.
Phase 4. Normal behavior learning and feature fusion. The graphs
constructed by the normal dataset are fed into the DGI network, and the
model is learned to represent the nominal behavior of the wind turbines.
Details are described in Section 3.3.
Phase 5. Health status evaluation and anomaly detection. The outputs
in Phase 4 represented the normal behavior of the system (wind turbine
in this work), the health status of the system in normal and abnormal
(fault) states can be captured with an energy-based model, RBM, where
C. Feng et al.
Fig. 4. Geometric relation of the reduced power in the wind speed power curve diagram.
the normal states are widely seen and treated as low-energy (high-
probability) events in the RBM, and the abnormal (low-probability)
states will be detected as high-energy events. The anomaly score is
defined based on the energy states of the RBM in the last step, and the
alarm thresholds can be pre-defined and used to detect the anomaly state
and identify the abnormal node in the time series.
3.2. Graphical modeling of time-series data for SCADA systems (Phase 2
and Phase 3)
In this work, the graphical modeling for SCADA data is primary and
important for subsequent unsupervised graph learning and anomaly
detection.
The normalized raw time-series data samples are firstly abstracted as
a matrix S ∈ RK×N , where K is the number of variables in the time-series
data or the number of measurements in the samples, and N is the length
of time series data or the number of sampling points in the samples. Then
the graphs are defined as G = (V, E), where the nodes V are defined as
the states of the wind turbine at time t, represented by several features
(described in Section 3.2.1), and the edges E are defined as the temporal
relationships between the different moment in the data. Formally, the
node feature vector is → x t = F (S:,t ) = [f1 , f2 , f3 , …, fF ] ∈ RF , where →
xt
denotes the node feature vector at time t, or the feature vector of the
node t; F (•) denotes the mapping function for computing features that
can represent the status of the wind turbine; S:,t denotes the data at
column tth in the matrix S, i.e. the value of all monitoring variables at
time t; fi denotes the ith characteristic parameter designed by mapping
function F (•), F is the number of all features in a node feature vector.
The graph nodes feature matrix X = {→ x 1, → x 2 , …, →x N } ∈ RN×F is ob­
tained by merging all nodes’ feature vectors. Next, the adjacency matrix
A ∈ RN×N is designed based on the graph construction idea described in
Section 3.2.2.
3.2.1. Feature extraction for node representations in graphical modeling
In this study, the mapping function F used to design features is
utilized for feature extraction. The features representing the operating
state of wind turbines can be divided into three categories: the charac­
teristic curve based, the normal behavior model based, and the relative
temperature difference based. The corresponding mapping functions are
F 1 , F 2 , and F 3 .
(a) The Mapping Function F Based on Characteristic Curve
1
313
Renewable Energy 206 (2023) 309–323
In this paper, the mapping function F 1 is designed to calculate a
new parameter representing the power generation capacity of a wind
turbine, named reduced power, considering the distribution character­
istics of outlier points in the characteristic curve (here is the wind speed
power curve) scatter diagram. The construction of this parameter mainly
relies on the slope of the outlier points and the physical meaning of the
wind speed power scatter diagram, the detail of which is shown in Fig. 4.
The wind speed power curve is divided into four areas in Fig. 4, but
the study about the reduced power only focuses on the first three areas:
startup area, maximum wind energy capture area, and constant power
operation area.
The construction of the reduced power starts from the maximum
wind energy capture area first. In this area, the distribution of power
points is approximately a straight line with a slope of ξc = pr /(vr − vin ).
In other words, the slope of points in this area should fluctuate near ξc
under the normal state of power. Take point B as an example, this point
is the one deviating from the normal range of wind speed power curve
with a slope less than ξc . Based on the above analysis, the formula for
calculating the reduced power in the maximum wind energy capture
area can be given:
p
ξ= (vin < v ≤ vr ) (5)
v − vin
As there are fewer outlier points in the startup area and most points
are in the shutdown state (such as point A), the reduced power of this
area is always normal value, that is,
pr
ξ = ξc = (v ≤ vin ) (6)
vr − vin
In the constant power operation area, the power in a normal state is
always the rated power, the slope calculation has nothing to do with
wind speed. However, to keep the same order of magnitude and form of
reduced power between this area and the above two areas, the formula
for calculating reduced power in this area is given as follows:
p
ξ= (v > vr ) (7)
vr − vin
In conclusion, the reduced power ξ refers to the power generated by a
wind turbine at unit wind speed. In practical application, we take the
logarithm of the above formula and fine-tune the range of wind speed
range, to avoid infinite value when calculating the reduced power near
cut-in wind speed. The formula of the reduced power for wind turbines is
summarized as follows:
C. Feng et al. Renewable Energy 206 (2023) 309–323

⎧ ( )
⎪
⎪ pr influence of future nodes’ features is not considered, i.e., a directed
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪
ln
vr − vin
v ≤ vin + 0.1 graph with a sliding window. The construction flow of the adjacency
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎨ (p + 0.1) matrix is shown in Fig. 5.
ξ = F 1 (v) = ln vin + 0.1 < v ≤ vr (8)
⎪
⎪ v − vin
⎪
⎪
⎪ (p + 0.1)
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ 3.3. Feature fusion based on local-global mutual information
⎩ ln v > vr
vr − vin maximization (Phase 4)

3.3.1. The formulation for feature fusion

(b) The Mapping Function F 2 Based on Normal Behavior Model
Relying on the defined graph node feature matrix and graph adja­
cency matrix, the unsupervised graph learning idea is used for feature
As a complex system, the components of a wind turbine are coupled
fusion in this work.
with each other, and different monitoring variables are correlated with
According to Eq. (11) [32], the nodes feature information X (graph
each other, so this correlation can be used to construct features for wind
node feature matrix) and the graph structure information A (graph ad­
turbines, i.e., the mapping function F 2 .
jacency matrix) are used to aggregate neighbor nodes information and
In this paper, Pearson correlation analysis is used to calculate the
are activated by the nonlinear function, to obtain the nonlinear nodes
correlation between different monitoring variables obtained from the
feature information.
SCADA dataset. Several main monitoring variables are selected ac­
( )
cording to their representation ability and their correlated monitoring → ∑
variables are also selected according to the condition of a correlation h =σ
i α Wx →
i,j j (11)
coefficient greater than 0.5. Then, a deep neural network is used to
j∈N i

establish a multivariable regression model between the main monitoring

variables and their correlated monitoring variables, named the normal
behavior model. Finally, the absolute error between the model predic­
tion value and the real value of each main monitoring variable is ob­
tained, as shown in Eq. (9).
⃒ ⃒
eM = F 2 (M) = ⃒Mpr edcit − Mreal ⃒ (9)
where Mpredcit is the model prediction value of the main monitoring
variable M, Mreal is its real value and eM is the derived characteristic
parameter (named absolute error) based on the normal behavior model.
where, αi,j represents the edge weight when aggregating neighbor nodes
information, W represents the parameter matrix for transforming the
dimension of nodes feature matrix, N i represents the neighbor nodes set
∑
of node i obtained from adjacency matrix information, thus αi,j W→
xj
j∈N i
represents the weighted aggregation of neighbor nodes information for
node i; σ ( ⋅) represents the nonlinear activation for weighted aggregated
→
nodes features, and finally obtaining a node embedding vector h i
summarizing a patch of the graph centered around node i rather than
just the node itself, named patch representations [32]. The above pro­
→ → →
cess can be summarized as H = ℇ(X, A) = { h 1 , h 2 , …, h N } ∈ RN×F ,
′

(c) The Mapping Function F 3 Based on Relative Temperature

named the encoder, where ℇ : RN×F × RN×N →RN×F is the encoder
′

Difference
In the main transmission chain of a wind turbine, the occurrence of
failure is always accompanied by a rise in temperature. Noted that the
temperature at the fault will be significantly higher than the tempera­
ture at the non-fault and it relative to the environmental temperature
will also have a significant rise. Therefore, two types of features based on
relative temperature differences are designed to describe a wind tur­
bine’s state, they are temperature differences between different vari­
ables and temperature differences relative to environmental
temperature. The formula of the mapping function F 3 is described as
follows.
ΔT = F 3 (MA , MB ) = |MA − MB | (10)
where MA and MB are two monitoring parameters used to calculate
temperature difference, ΔT is the derived characteristic parameter
(named absolute temperature error).
function. Noted that in this work, the difference between the encoder
functions used in different methods is mainly the calculation approach
of edge weight αi,j that is divided into the fixed weight (in the GCN
encoder) and the learnable weight (in the GAT encoder).
The main target of the DGI model is to train a feature extractor based
on the local-global mutual information maximization to obtain local
representations capturing the global information of the graph [32].
Therefore, a readout function R : RN×F →RF is first introduced to
′ ′
summarize the patch representations calculated by the encoder into
graph-level representation → s , as shown in Eq. (12), [32].
( )
1 ∑N
→
→s = R (ℇ(X, A)) = R (H) = σ hi (12)
N i=1
that is, the simple average vector of all the node features in the graph is
denoted as the representation vector for graph global information.
Next, a discriminator D : RF × RF →R is introduced as a proxy for
′ ′

To sum up, all the above features will be used to form the feature
vector of a node in a graph, and the feature vectors of all nodes will be maximizing the local mutual information to give a probability score for
put together and normalized to form the nodes feature matrix. →
the patch-summary pair ( h , →
s ), as shown in Eq. (13), [32].
i
( ) ( )
3.2.2. Edge formulation for graphical modeling →
D h i, →
→T
s = σ h i W→
s (13)
In our definition of the graph derived from SCADA data, the features
(the node feature vector) representing the operating state of wind tur­
this is a bilinear scoring function used to convert scores into probabili­
bines at a certain time are defined as the nodes feature matrix, so the →
relationship between nodes (i.e., edge in the graph) should be defined as ties of ( h i , →
s ) being a positive sample, where W is a learnable scoring
the relationship between the operating state of wind turbines at different matrix and σ ( ⋅) is the logistic sigmoid nonlinearity function.
times. Inspired by this idea, a time-series-based design idea for graph To successfully maximize the generation probability of the above
structure (i.e., the adjacency matrix) is proposed in this study, in which a → → →
positive sample ( h i , →s ), the negative sample ( ̃
h j , ̃s ) is also needed to be
sliding window is used to describe the influence of past nodes and future
designed for contrastive training. Thus, a corruption function C :
nodes on the current node. Specifically speaking, only the influence of
past nodes’ features on the current node state is considered, while the RN×F × RN×N →RM×F × RM×M is introduced to obtain the negative sam­
ples from the raw samples, as shown in Eq. (14), [32]. In this work, the

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Fig. 5. The time-series-based construction idea for the adjacency matrix.

specific process of C is to preserve the raw adjacency matrix, i.e., A

̃ = assumptions, the graph adjacency matrix is formed.
A, and obtain the corrupted nodes feature matrix X ̃ by a row-wise Part 3. The nonlinear correlation capturing in SCADA data and the
shuffling of X. statistical characteristics extraction for wind turbines. Considering the
nonlinear correlation hidden in the SCADA data, we not only use the
̃ = C (X, A)
̃ A)
(X, (14)
edges in the graph to connect nodes features at different moments
Finally, the objective function L (as shown in Eq. (15) [32]) is used calculated from SCADA data but also use the encoder constructed by DGI
→
to effectively maximize the mutual information between h i and → s to aggregate the one-order neighbor information of nodes features and
based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the joint and the to nonlinearly activate these features based on Eq. (11). Therefore, the
product of marginals, that is, maximize the generation probability for updated nodes feature matrix not only reduces the dimensions of the
positive samples and minimize the generation probability for negative high-dimensional physical feature space for the nodes but also extracts
samples to maximize the correlation of the obtained patch representa­ the statistical features of SCADA data based on the local-global mutual
tions and the global representation. information maximization principle. With this setup, the dimensionality
( reduction of high-dimensional SCADA data is realized
[ ( )]
1 ∑N
→ The unsupervised feature extraction algorithm based on physical-
L = E(X,A) log D h i , →
s
N + M i=1 statistical feature fusion is summarized in Algorithm 1.
[ ( (→ ))]) (15)
∑M
→ Algorithm 1. Feature Extraction Based on Physical-Statistical
̃
E ̃ ̃ log 1 − D h j , ̃s
+
(X ,A) Feature Fusion
j=1

3.3.2. The algorithm for feature fusion

Inspired by the feature aggregation capability applied in a graph of a
DGI network, an unsupervised feature extraction algorithm based on 3.4. Unsupervised anomaly detection (Phase 5)
physical-statistical feature fusion is proposed in this work.
The updated nodes feature matrix obtained from DGI will be sent
Part 1. The physical features calculation for wind turbines. The self-
into RBM for unsupervised training and the RBM energy of each node
defined mapping function F = [F 1 , F 2 , F 3 ] is used to design several
will be calculated through Eq. (4). These energy values are used for
physical features representing the operating state of wind turbines at
computing the status score of the nodes in a graph.
each moment from three perspectives of characteristics curve based
The normal state samples will be used to train the DGI-RBM normal
(F 1 ), normal behavior model based (F 2 ) and relative temperature
behavior model for calculating the mean value μ and the standard
difference based (F 3 ), thus obtaining the node feature vector. After
variance σ of normal nodes’ status scores. Subsequently, the abnormal
normalizing this matrix according to each parameter, the normalized
state sample is sent into the trained DGI-RBM model to calculate the
and follow-up required nodes feature matric is obtained
status scores of the abnormal state sample nodes. According to the
Part 2. The temporal dependence extraction for SCADA data. The principle of 3σ , the anomaly score of each node status score is obtained
sliding window is applied in the construction of the graph adjacency by Eq. (16) for anomaly detection:
matrix ⎧
e − (μ + 3σ )
On the one hand, the interrelation between the nodes out of the ⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ e ≥ μ + 3σ
⎪ 6σ
window and the ones in the window is not considered, which means that ⎨
the influence of the node at some moment on the nodes at other mo­ score = 0 μ − 3σ < e < μ + 3σ (16)
⎪
⎪
⎪
ments only exists on a finite time scale. In other words, larger time scale ⎪
⎪
⎩ (μ − 3 σ ) − e
e ≤ μ − 3σ
and weaker influence. In this work, this temporal attenuation effect is 6σ
simplified as 0/1, i.e., the interrelation in the window is defined as 1,
while the one out the window is defined as 0. where e is the status score of each node in an abnormal sample, and
On the other hand, the connection between the nodes within the = 0 denotes anomaly.
score ∕
sliding window is directed, the past nodes influence the current node, Remark. The presented DGI-RBM framework realizes unsupervised
while the future nodes do not influence the current node, which is anomaly detection in two aspects, (i) graphical modeling and feature
consistent with the actual physics regulation. According to the above learning via DGI. The features (the nodes in the graphs) are sent to DGI
with the graph adjacent matrix (the edges in the graphs), and the local-

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global mutual information maximization principle is applied to reduce
the dimension of the features and learn the patterns in different time
steps in an unsupervised manner, (ii) The system behavior learning via
RBM, where the recurring states in the system are learned as low-energy
state (detected as normal), and the low-probability states are detected as
anomalous. The previous one with DGI intends to learn the short-time
behavior of the system and the later one with RBM is to learning
system-wide behavior in a long term and identify those with different
patterns learned by DGI. Therefore, the integrated DGI-RBM framework
could efficiently process the multivariate time-series in SCADA system,
to capture the system behavior thru quite a number of measurements
and detect the anomalies in an unsupervised way. Note that, although
the DGI-RBM framework is formed with the SCADA data of wind tur­
bines, it can be easily applied to other systems, especially distributed
complex systems with different kind of measurements.
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4. Results and discussion
4.1. Dataset
With the proposed approach, the case studies are carried out using
the SCADA dataset, which is collected from a wind farm in northeast
China. The SCADA system installed in this wind farm mainly monitors
37 state parameters of 26 wind turbines including wind speed, active
power, generator average speed, gearbox bearing temperature and so
on. According to the mean correlation coefficients between the moni­
toring parameters of all wind turbines in this wind farm, 7 parameters
with a low correlation coefficient are neglected in this study, and the
remaining 30 parameters are used for subsequent analysis, as shown in
Table .1.
4.2. Data preprocessing
The existence of abnormal data in the raw dataset will seriously
affect the accuracy of normal behavior learning for features and
C. Feng et al. Renewable Energy 206 (2023) 309–323

Tabel.1 Tabel.2
30 parameters used in this study and their symbolic representations. Seven main monitoring variables and their correlated monitoring variables.
No. Parameters Unit No. Parameters Unit No. Main Monitoring Variables Correlated Monitoring Variables

M1 NCC300 temperature ◦
C M16 Temperature, pitch ◦
C f2 Active Power M5, M9, M10, M13, M17, M18, M19, M23,
motor 3 M25, M26, M27, M28, M29, M30
M2 NCC320 temperature ◦
C M17 Pitch motor 1 Nm f3 Gearbox Bearing Temperature M10, M13, M18, M21, M23, M25, M28
torque f4 Gearbox Oil Temperature M9, M13, M17, M18, M19, M21, M23,
M3 Grid side inductance ◦
C M18 Pitch motor 2 Nm M25, M26, M27, M28, M29, M30
temperature torque f5 Generator Bearing M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M12, M13, M17,
M4 Machine side inductance ◦
C M19 Pitch motor 3 Nm Temperature in Driving M18, M19
temperature torque Direction
M5 Machine side ◦
C M20 Nacelle ◦
C f6 Generator Bearing M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, M11, M13, M17,
semiconductor temperature Temperature in Non-driving M18, M19
temperature Direction
M6 Grid side semiconductor ◦
C M21 Active power kW f7 Maximum Generator Winding M3, M4, M5, M6, M9, M10, M11, M12,
temperature Temperature M14, M15, M16, M17, M18, M19, M21,
M7 Ambient temperature ◦
C M22 Nacelle battery ◦
C M23, M25 M26, M27, M28, M29, M30
temperature f8 Nacelle Temperature M1, M2, M4, M7, M8, M14, M15, M16,
M8 Filter plate temperature ◦
C M23 1-s average wind m/s M22
speed
M9 Gearbox bearing ◦
C M24 Maximum yaw kW
temperature power Remove the abnormal data points of several parameters, including
M10 Gearbox oil temperature C M25 Generator average rpm
gearbox bearing temperature, gearbox oil temperature, generator
◦

speed
M11 Generator bearing ◦
C M26 Minimum generator rpm
bearing temperature in driving direction, generator bearing temperature
temperature in driving speed in non-driving direction, maximum generator winding temperature, and
direction nacelle temperature, according to the normal range of monitoring pa­
M12 Generator bearing ◦
C M27 Maximum rpm rameters summarized by the dataset and Ref. [41].
temperature in non-driving generator speed
According to the above steps, the data cleaning for 26 wind turbines
direction
M13 Maximum generator ◦
C M28 Control generator rpm is carried out. Taking the No.13 wind turbine as an example, the
winding temperature average speed cleaning results of which are shown in Fig. 6, where (a) shows the
M14 Temperature, pitch motor ◦
C M29 Minimum control rpm cleaning result based on the standard wind speed power curve. (b) shows
1 generator speed the cleaning result based on the standard generator speed power curve.
M15 Temperature, pitch motor ◦
C M30 Maximum control rpm
2 generator speed
As a result, the normal data used to train the normal behavior model is
obtained.

anomaly detection. Therefore, it is necessary to perform data cleaning

4.3. Formulation of features
based on the operating characteristics of individual wind turbines. The
details for data cleaning are described below:
The reduced power is firstly calculated by Eq. (8), represented by f1 .
Remove those data points that are significantly outside the normal
As for the features based on the normal behavior model, the seven
range according to the characteristic parameters of wind turbines (such
main monitoring variables used in this paper and their correlated
as cut-in wind speed, cut-off wind speed, rated wind speed, and rated
monitoring variables are shown in Tabel2. These seven parameters and
power).
their correlated parameters are used to calculate the features according
Remove fault points according to fault records provided by wind
to the method of Section 3.2.1.(b).
farms.
As for the features based on the relative temperature difference, eight
Remove outlier points in the wind speed power scatter diagram by
features are designed, as shown in Table .3.
using the bin method, Root Mean Square method, or Kernel Density
In conclusion, 16 features are designed to represent wind turbines
Estimation method according to the standard wind speed power curve of
operating state at a certain time.
wind turbines.
Remove outliers in the speed power scatter diagram by using the bin
method, Root Mean Square method, or Kernel Density Estimation 4.4. Parameters of graphs
method according to the standard generator speed power curve of wind
turbines. Using the method of Section 3.2.2 and considering the SCADA
dataset size, the parameters of the graph structure are set as follows:

Fig. 6. The cleaning results of the No.13 wind turbine where black points denote normal points and grey points denote outliers.

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Tabel.3
Eight features based on the relative temperature difference.
No. Parameters Description
f9 The relative temperature difference between Generator
Bearing Temperature in Driving Direction and Generator
Bearing Temperature in Non-driving Direction
f10 The relative temperature difference between Generator
Bearing Temperature in Driving Direction and Gearbox Oil
Temperature
f11 The relative temperature difference between Generator
Bearing Temperature in Non-driving Direction and Gearbox
Oil Temperature
f12 The relative temperature difference between Nacelle
Temperature and Ambient Temperature
f13 The relative temperature difference between Generator
Bearing Temperature in Driving Direction and Ambient
Temperature
f14 The relative temperature difference between Generator
Bearing Temperature in Non-driving Direction and Ambient
Temperature
f15 The relative temperature difference between Gearbox Oil
Temperature and Ambient Temperature
f16 The relative temperature difference between Gearbox Bearing
Temperature and Ambient Temperature
The number of nodes in a graph is 1008, i.e., each graph mainly
focuses on 7-days’ data including fault data.
The sliding window size is 30, i.e., the wind turbine state at each
moment will be influenced by the past 5 h’ data.
4.5. Evaluation metrics and comparison methods
In this work, recall rate, precision rate, F1 value, and accuracy rate
(As shown in Eqs. (17)–(20)) are selected to evaluate the anomaly
detection performance of the proposed approach.
TP
Recall =
TP + FN
Precision =
TP
TP + FP
2⋅Recall⋅Precision
F1 =
Recall + Precision
TP + TN
Accuracy =
TP + TN + FP + FN
where TP, TN, FP, FN are the numbers of true positives, true negatives,
false positives, and false negatives.
To verify the validity of the proposed framework, three comparison
methods are selected in this paper.
DGI(GCN)-RBM: this method is based on the DGI-RBM model with a
GCN encoder to detect anomalies and it will put the nodes’ feature in­
formation and the graph structure information together to calculate the
RBM energy value.
DGI(GAT)-RBM: GAT can overcome the GCN’s limitation of
measuring the information importance of node only by the structural
information of the graph, and uses learnable weights instead of fixed
weights to capture important information. Therefore, this study trans­
forms the GCN encoder into a GAT encoder, hoping to achieve better
anomaly detection performance.
RBM: this method is only used to analyze the influence of graph
structure on anomaly detection effect.
4.6. Experiments
4.6.1. Fault samples
With the above-mentioned setups, three types of anomalies in a real
wind farm are successfully detected using the proposed approach. The
Renewable Energy 206 (2023) 309–323
details are described below and the operating data of 30 monitoring
variables corresponding to these anomalies are shown in Fig. 7.
Formula Hub speed signal difference. This fault occurred in the No.6 wind
turbine with fault number 3057, the description for which is “Hub
|M11 −
M12| rotation speed signal difference, rotation speed difference of 1 s is
greater than 1000 rpm”. As shown in Fig. 7(a), the obvious difference in
|M11 − hub speed directly causes generator shutdown (Parameter M25), which
M10| leads to the output power zero (Parameter M21). For some commonly
|M12 −
used monitoring parameters such as gearbox bearing temperature
M10| (Parameter M9), gearbox oil temperature (Parameter M10), and
generator bearing temperature (Parameter M11/M12), the anomaly
|M20 − makes them decline in the trend. In this case, the above-mentioned
M7|
phenomenon can be interpreted as the hub speed change will affect
|M11 −
M7| the friction intensity between bearings and shafts, i.e., lower hub speed,
weaker friction intensity, and lower bearing temperature. And the
|M12 − similar trend is also shown in nacelle temperature (Parameter M20) and
M7| other temperature parameters.
|M10 −
Grid actual power anomaly. This fault occurred in the No.6 wind
M7| turbine with fault number 3352, the description for which is “Compare
|M9 − M7| the measured power and parameters of the grid, and if they exceed a
certain level, a fault occurs”. As shown in Fig. 7(b), the measured power
anomaly is directly shown in active power (Parameter M21), and the
wind speed (Parameter M23) is also zero. Therefore, the root cause of
this anomaly may be the sudden decrease in wind speed.
Anemometer communication error. This fault occurred in the No.13
wind turbine with fault number 10091, the description for which is
“Anemometer communication error occurs if no data packet is received
from anemometer within 5 s”. As shown in Fig. 7(c), the wind speed
(Parameter M23) jumps to zero when the fault occurs and other pa­
rameters also vary to a certain extent.
The experiments are arranged as follows: the effectiveness of the
proposed method for capturing nonlinear correlation in the SCADA
dataset is verified in Section 4.6.2. The effects of the proposed method
for extracting temporal dependence in the SCADA dataset are tested in
(17)
Section 4.6.3. The effects of the proposed method for feature extraction
based on physical-statistical feature fusion and dimensionality reduction
(18) are shown in Section 4.6.4. Finally, the effectiveness and accuracy of the
proposed method are analyzed in Section 4.6.5.
(19) 4.6.2. Effectiveness of nonlinear correlation capture
The achievement of the nonlinear correlation capture for the SCADA
dataset in this method mainly depends on the nonlinear activation of the
(20) graph deep learning method, i.e., the nonlinear activation function σ in
Eq. (11). To make a better comparison for the influence of nonlinear
activation function on anomaly detection, this experiment takes Fault
#3057 as an example to design two graph deep learning training models
with/without nonlinear activation, the results of which are shown in
Fig. 8, where red represents DGI(GCN) with activation, blue represents
DGI(GCN) without activation, green represents DGI(GAT) with activa­
tion and orange represents DGI(GAT) without activation. It can be found
that: (i) nonlinear activation function can effectively improve the per­
formance of anomaly detection. (ii) From the perspective of the encoder,
the detection effect of the GAT encoder is better than that of the GCN
encoder. (iii) The anomaly detection effect improvement by nonlinear
activation function in the GAT encoder is weaker than that in the GCN
encoder, which is related to the great improvement in feature aggre­
gation capability by learnable weights in GAT. In a word, the nonlinear
activation function in DGI can effectively capture the nonlinear corre­
lation of the SCADA dataset.
4.6.3. Effect analysis of temporal dependence extraction
The temporal dependence extraction is mainly realized by the sliding
window in this method. However, a large sliding window will make each
node aggregate a large range of information and weaken the uniqueness
of the updated node information, while a small sliding window will
weaken the temporal dependence extracted by each node. Thus the
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Fig. 7. The raw data of all monitoring variables in three fault samples, where blue/red represents the normal/abnormal state.
sliding window with an appropriate size is beneficial to extracting the
temporal dependence of the dataset as much as possible. To discuss the
influence of sliding window size on anomaly detection, this experiment
takes Fault #3057 and Fault #3352 as examples to analyze the trend of
anomaly detection evaluation metrics changing with sliding window
size (from 1 h to 24 h), as shown in Fig. 9, where the normal range of
these metrics is [0, 1] and − 1 represents calculation error. It can be
found that: (i) Both too large and too small sliding windows will weaken
the effect of anomaly detection. (ii) The evaluation metrics of anomaly
detection reach the optimal configuration when the sliding window is 5
h.
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4.6.4. Effect of DGI on feature extraction and dimensionality reduction
This experiment takes Fault #3352 as an example to show the effect
of feature extraction and dimensionality reduction carried out by the
proposed method, as shown in Fig. 10, where blue represents a normal
state, and red represents an abnormal state. It can be found that: (i) the
first time’s dimensionality reduction of wind turbines raw monitoring
data information is carried out for the model input features from the
perspective of physical characteristics, preliminarily reducing the input
information redundancy, as shown in Fig. 10(a). (ii) The second time’s
dimensionality reduction is realized through statistical-based feature
aggregation and nonlinear activation performed by the DGI model,
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Fig. 8. The influence of nonlinear activation function on anomaly detection.

Fig. 9. The trend of anomaly detection evaluation metrics changing with sliding window size.

Fig. 10. The input features obtained from raw data and updated features extracted by the DGI-RBM model for Fault #3352.

further reducing the input information redundancy, as shown in Fig. 10
(b) and (c). (iii) The feature extraction effect of the DGI(GAT) model is
superior to that of the DGI(GCN).
4.6.5. Effectiveness and accuracy of graph deep learning network
This experiment takes Fault #10091 as an example to reflect RBM
energy-based state evaluation result and anomaly detection result, as
shown in Fig. 11, where blue represents a normal state, red represents an
abnormal state, the black dotted line indicates the upper and lower
limits of the anomaly detection threshold, and the green dotted line
indicates the start and end of the fault. (a) shows the results of RBM
energy and anomaly score based on the DGI-RBM model with GCN
encoder. (b) shows the results of RBM energy and anomaly score based
on the DGI-RBM model with GAT encoder. (c) shows the results of RBM
energy and anomaly score based on the RBM model. It can be found that:
(i) compared with the RBM model (i.e., the model without graph

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Fig. 11. The anomaly detection result for Fault #10091.

Table 4
The best performance evaluation results for six models in terms of Recall, Precision, F1-score, and Accuracy.
Method #3057 #3352 #10091

Rec Prec F1 Acc Rec Prec F1 Acc Rec Prec F1 Acc

DGI(GCN)-RBM 0.84 0.87 0.85 0.96 0.74 0.89 0.81 0.88 0.38 0.53 0.44 0.92
DGI(GAT)-RBM 0.90 0.85 0.88 0.97 0.72 0.98 0.83 0.90 0.87 1.00 0.93 0.99
RBM 0.73 0.40 0.51 0.83 0.39 0.99 0.56 0.79 0.22 0.10 0.14 0.75
TadGAN [42] 1.00 0.12 0.21 0.47 0.22 0.56 0.32 0.67 0.07 0.02 0.03 0.78
COUTA [43] 0.85 0.60 0.71 0.96 0.27 0.68 0.39 0.74 0.31 0.82 0.45 0.97
GDN [44] 1.00 0.48 0.65 0.97 0.23 0.44 0.30 0.81 0.93 0.34 0.50 0.96

information), DGI-RBM achieves an excellent anomaly detection per­
formance (ii) The modification of the DGI’s encoder (i.e., transforming
GCN to GAT). effectively improves the feature extraction capability of
DGI, and naturally significantly improves the performance of the pro­
posed anomaly detection method, which also reflects the advantages of
learnable weights over fixed weights.
The best performance evaluation results for the above three models
are shown in Table .4. DGI-RBM model is stronger than the RBM model,
i.e., the information contained in the sample will be more comprehen­
sive and the detection ability of the model will be stronger if the graph
structure information is embedded in the training and prediction process
using DGI. Especially for the DGI-RBM model with a GAT encoder, the
improvement of learnable weights enables the model to mine sample
features as much as possible without the constraint of fixed weights. It is
worth noting that the precision rate metric of the RBM model has a high
value (0.99), which can be interpreted as: in the nodes features of this
anomaly, the mutation between normal nodes and abnormal nodes is
obvious. This mutation feature can be utilized by RBM to make the
detected anomaly results almost all correct, while some false detections
for normal nodes appear in the DGI detection result due to the weak­
ening effect of the designed sliding window on mutation. Nevertheless,
the excellent performance of the DGI-RBM model in anomaly detection
is indisputable.
In addition, the comparison of the proposed method with another
three state-of-the-art time series anomaly detection models is also shown
in Table .4. The TadGAN [42] is used to reconstruct time series and
contextually assess errors to identify anomalies. The COUTA [43] is an
unsupervised method based on calibrated one-class classification for
time series anomaly detection. The GDN [44] learns a graph of re­
lationships between sensors and detects deviations from these patterns
to find anomalies in time series. The results show that DGI(GAT)-RBM
outperforms these three models in real-world cases, which further in­
dicates (i) the anomaly detection methods (e.g., DGI-RBM): based on
graph structure information have stronger detection capability than
those (e.g., TadGAN, COUTA) relying only on time series (ii) the
methods introducing physical information (e.g., DGI-RBM); have
stronger anomaly detection capability than those (e.g., GDN) using only
monitoring data under the same conditions of graph-based methods.
4.7. Discussions
Four groups of experiments are conducted to analyze the perfor­
mance of the proposed method from different perspectives, and the re­
sults show that: (i) the method can capture the nonlinear correlation of
SCADA data by nonlinear activation function and graph learning
method. (ii) The method can extract the temporal dependence hidden in
SCADA data using the sliding window and optimize the extraction effect
by selecting an appropriate window size. (iii) The framework can realize
feature extraction and hierarchical dimensionality reduction from two
perspectives, physical characteristics and statistical characteristics. (iv)
The method can improve anomaly detection performance by the graph
neural network based on DGI. It can be concluded that the proposed
method can reduce the dimensionality and extract the latent nonlinear
correlation and temporal dependence for SCADA data, to detect wind

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turbine anomalies successfully.
As a new data expression with stronger representation capability, the
graph considers the monitoring values and the relationship between
different values in time-series data at the same time to more compre­
hensively delve into and express data information. Different from the
conventional time-series data processing method that only focuses on
local information, the proposed method uses the graphically recon­
structed data and the DGI to comprehensively consider the local and
global information of time-series data. Therefore, this method re­
constructs and expresses time-series data in a novel way (i.e., graph)
with a better outcome.
The proposed method strengthens the application of feature fusion in
anomaly detection, which is mainly in two aspects: firstly, the extraction
and dimensionality reduction of nodes features are realized from the
perspectives of physical and statistical characteristics respectively,
effectively extracting the main features of the dataset and reducing the
information redundancy. Secondly, the local and global characteristics
of the dataset are fused in the process of unsupervised training inspired
by the mutual information maximization principle. The fused features
strengthen the representation capability of the node embedding vector
and enable the downstream anomaly detector to catch the uniqueness of
each node more quickly, thus improving the anomaly detection
performance.
In this paper, DGI is the feature extractor and RBM is the anomaly
detector, the combination of which forms the framework for anomaly
detection. The results of the above research show that the proposed
feature extractor based on mutual information maximization and
physical-statistical feature fusion can fully delve into time-series data
feature information. Thus using this feature extractor, not only different
time-series data of different equipment can be processed but also a novel
fault diagnosis method can be developed. Moreover, changing the DGI
encoder to GAT can give full play to the advantages of learnable weights
and improve anomaly detection performance.
Given the superior applicability of the proposed approach in
handling time-series data and extracting features, future work will focus
on, (i) exploring the construction method for wind turbines system
graph structure and realizing anomaly detection and fault location for
wind turbines components, (ii) exploring the fault propagation mecha­
nism between different wind turbines components and construct a
complex system fault propagation network for wind turbines, (iii)
designing the fault tracing algorithm for wind turbines and trace the
fault source of wind turbines anomalies.
5. Conclusion
Motivated by the demand for wind turbines anomaly detection, the
stronger representation capability of graph data, and the fast develop­
ment of unsupervised graph neural networks, this work presents an
anomaly detection framework for wind turbines using SCADA data
based on physical-statistical feature fusion and an unsupervised GNNs
that can reduce data dimensionality, capture parameters nonlinear
correlation and extract data temporal dependence. The graphical
modeling method for SCADA data captures the correlation hidden in the
dataset in a graph-based manner. The designed/proposed physical fea­
tures purposely introduce the structure/mechanism information of wind
turbines to enrich the information in the extracted features. The pro­
posed DGI-RBM framework fully extracts the effective features repre­
senting the operating state of wind turbines in SCADA data in an
unsupervised local-global feature learning and physical-statistical
feature fusion manner, thus improving the performance of anomaly
detection for wind turbines. Finally, the validation and discussion for the
proposed method are carried out based on the experimental studies on
the real-world SCADA data, and the results show that i) the features
designed by the criterion of characteristic curves based, normal behavior
model based and relative temperature difference based can reasonably
represent wind turbines state and reduce the information redundancy,
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ii) the graph structure constructed by time-series based idea and a
sliding window can easily and effectively express the structure infor­
mation of SCADA dataset and extract temporal dependence, iii) and the
anomaly detection model constructed by DGI-RBM framework can fully
use the physical-statistical information and local-global information of
dataset, which has an excellent anomaly detection performance and can
be used to research the fault propagation mechanism and analysis the
root cause of fault in the future.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Chenlong Feng: Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal anal­
ysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing –
review & editing, Visualization. Chao Liu: Conceptualization, Method­
ology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing –
original draft, Writing – review & editing. Dongxiang Jiang: Supervi­
sion, Resources, Writing – review & editing, 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.
Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by the Huaneng Group science and
technology research project(HNKJ20-H50).
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