Technical Papers
Mar 26, 2018

Joint Prediction of Remaining Useful Life and Failure Type of Train Wheelsets: Multitask Learning Approach

Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 144, Issue 6

Abstract

Train wheel failures account for disruptions of train operations and even a large portion of train derailments. Remaining useful life (RUL) of a wheelset measures how soon the next failure will arrive, and the failure type reveals how severe the failure will be. RUL prediction is a regression task, whereas failure type is a classification task. In this paper, the authors propose a multitask learning approach to jointly accomplish these two tasks by using a common input space to achieve more desirable results. A convex optimization formulation is developed to integrate least-squares loss and negative maximum likelihood of logistic regression as well as model the joint sparsity as the L2/L1 norm of the model parameters to couple feature selection across tasks. The experiment results show that the multitask learning method outperforms both the single-task learning method and Random Forest.

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Go to Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 144Issue 6June 2018

History

Received: Mar 26, 2017
Accepted: Aug 1, 2017
Published online: Mar 26, 2018
Published in print: Jun 1, 2018
Discussion open until: Aug 26, 2018

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Authors

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Weixin Wang
M.S. Student, Dept. of Industrial and System Engineering, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York, 334 Bell Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260.
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering and Dept. of Industrial and System Engineering, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York, 313 Bell Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260 (corresponding author). E-mail: [email protected]
Yu Cui
Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York, 204 Ketter Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260.
Zhiguo Li
Research Staff Member, Statistics and Data Science, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Route 134 Kichawan Rd., Yorktown Heights, NY 10598.

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