Association Rule Mining-Based Dissolved Gas Analysis for Fault Diagnosis of Power Transformers

This paper presents a novel association rule mining (ARM)-based dissolved gas analysis (DGA) approach to fault diagnosis (FD) of power transformers. In the development of the ARM-based DGA approach, an attribute selection method and a continuous datum attribute discretization method are used for choosing user-interested ARM attributes from a DGA data set, i.e. the items that are employed to extract association rules. The given DGA data set is composed of two parts, i.e. training and test DGA data sets. An ARM algorithm namely Apriori-Total From Partial is proposed for generating an association rule set (ARS) from the training DGA data set. Afterwards, an ARS simplification method and a rule fitness evaluation method are utilized to select useful rules from the ARS and assign a fitness value to each of the useful rules, respectively. Based upon the useful association rules, a transformer FD classifier is developed, in which an optimal rule selection method is employed for selecting the most accurate rule from the classifier for diagnosing a test DGA record. For comparison purposes, five widely used FD methods are also tested with the same training and test data sets in experiments. Results show that the proposed ARM-based DGA approach is capable of generating a number of meaningful association rules, which can also cover the empirical rules defined in industry standards. Moreover, a higher FD accuracy can be achieved with the association rule-based FD classifier, compared with that derived by the other methods.