Junyang Jin

J. Jin, Y. Yuan, A. Webb et al.

Increasing attention has recently been given to the inference of sparse networks. In biology, for example, most molecules only bind to a small number of other molecules, leading to sparse molecular interaction networks. To achieve sparseness, a common approach consists of applying weighted penalties to the number of links between nodes in the network and the complexity of the dynamics of existing links. The selection of proper weights, however, is non-trivial. Alternatively, this paper proposes a novel data-driven method, called GESBL, that is able to penalise both network sparsity and model complexity without any tuning. GESBL combines Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) and Group Sparse Bayesian Learning (GSBL) to introduce penalties for complexity, both in terms of element (system order of nonzero connections) and group sparsity (network topology). The paper considers a class of sparse linear time-invariant networks where the dynamics are represented by multivariable ARX models. Data generated from sparse random ARX networks and synthetic gene regulatory networks indicate that our method, on average, considerably outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method can be applied to a wide range of fields, from systems biology applications in signalling and genetic regulatory networks to power systems.

Yasen Wang, Junyang Jin, Jorge Goncalves

Network inference has been extensively studied in several fields, such as systems biology and social sciences. Learning network topology and internal dynamics is essential to understand mechanisms of complex systems. In particular, sparse topologies and stable dynamics are fundamental features of many real-world continuous-time (CT) networks. Given that usually only a partial set of nodes are able to observe, in this paper, we consider linear CT systems to depict networks since they can model unmeasured nodes via transfer functions. Additionally, measurements tend to be noisy and with low and varying sampling frequencies. For this reason, we consider CT models since discrete-time approximations often require fine-grained measurements and uniform sampling steps. The developed method applies dynamical structure functions (DSFs) derived from linear stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to describe networks of measured nodes. A numerical sampling method, preconditioned Crank-Nicolson (pCN), is used to refine coarse-grained trajectories to improve inference accuracy. The convergence property of the developed method is robust to the dimension of data sources. Monte Carlo simulations indicate that the developed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods including group sparse Bayesian learning (GSBL), BINGO, kernel-based methods, dynGENIE3, GENIE3, and ARNI. The simulations include random and ring networks, and a synthetic biological network. These are challenging networks, suggesting that the developed method can be applied under a wide range of contexts, such as gene regulatory networks, social networks, and communication systems.

Wenqian Jiang, Junyang Jin

Diagnosis of ice accretion on wind turbine blades is all the time a hard nut to crack in condition monitoring of wind farms. Existing methods focus on mechanism analysis of icing process, deviation degree analysis of feature engineering. However, there have not been deep researches of neural networks applied in this field at present. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) makes it possible to train networks through continuously providing not only operation parameters and performance parameters of wind turbines but also environmental parameters and operation modes. This paper explores the possibility that using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), generative adversarial networks (GANs) and domain adaption learning to establish intelligent diagnosis frameworks under different training scenarios. Specifically, PGANC and PGANT are proposed for sufficient and non-sufficient target wind turbine labeled data, respectively. The basic idea is that we consider a two-stage training with parallel GANs, which are aimed at capturing intrinsic features for normal and icing samples, followed by classification CNN or domain adaption module in various training cases. Model validation on three wind turbine SCADA data shows that two-stage training can effectively improve the model performance. Besides, if there is no sufficient labeled data for a target turbine, which is an extremely common phenomenon in real industrial practices, the addition of domain adaption learning makes the trained model show better performance. Overall, our proposed intelligent diagnosis frameworks can achieve more accurate detection on the same wind turbine and more generalized capability on a new wind turbine, compared with other machine learning models and conventional CNNs.

J. Jin, Y. Yuan, W. Pan et al.

This paper begins with considering the identification of sparse linear time-invariant networks described by multivariable ARX models. Such models possess relatively simple structure thus used as a benchmark to promote further research. With identifiability of the network guaranteed, this paper presents an identification method that infers both the Boolean structure of the network and the internal dynamics between nodes. Identification is performed directly from data without any prior knowledge of the system, including its order. The proposed method solves the identification problem using Maximum a posteriori estimation (MAP) but with inseparable penalties for complexity, both in terms of element (order of nonzero connections) and group sparsity (network topology). Such an approach is widely applied in Compressive Sensing (CS) and known as Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL). We then propose a novel scheme that combines sparse Bayesian and group sparse Bayesian to efficiently solve the problem. The resulted algorithm has a similar form of the standard Sparse Group Lasso (SGL) while with known noise variance, it simplifies to exact re-weighted SGL. The method and the developed toolbox can be applied to infer networks from a wide range of fields, including systems biology applications such as signaling and genetic regulatory networks.