Executive Summary
Predictive maintenance is often demonstrated with neural networks (NNs) operating on raw high-rate sensor streams. While these approaches can achieve strong benchmark accuracy, they are frequently difficult to deploy on edge devices due to compute-budget, power, latency, and data-transfer constraints.
This white paper presents a physics-inspired, analog signal-processing-based feature pipeline based on the CLA-RiSTOR® methodology and evaluates it on the MAFAULDA machinery fault dataset [1]. The approach compresses each 5-second measurement into a small set of engineered, physically interpretable features derived from event-triggered integration across multiple parameterized “views” of the same signal.
In our current MAFAULDA benchmark, our approach reaches macro-F1 ≈ 0.75, compared to macro-F1 ≈ 0.94 reported by a neural network as reference [2]. While the neural network remains stronger on pure benchmark accuracy, CLA-RiSTOR® is designed to win on what matters in production edge deployments: reduced data volume, deterministic inference, low energy consumption, and reliable on-device operation.
1. Why Edge Analytics Needs a Different Kind of Model
Industrial customers typically care about more than accuracy alone:
- Low latency: detect issues in real time without cloud round-trips.
- Low power: continuous monitoring must fit power and thermal budgets.
- Low bandwidth: streaming raw high-rate signals is expensive and often impractical.
- Noise robustness: industrial signals are often noisy; reliable monitoring must be stable under interference, mounting differences, and changing operating conditions.
- Robust deployment: deterministic behavior, stable updates, and simple explainability.
Neural networks can be excellent when compute and data are abundant. On-device processing reduces the need to send raw sensor signals to the cloud for centralized processing, which helps lower bandwidth costs, latency, and operational complexity—especially in high-rate vibration monitoring.