Breaking the Homogeneity Assumption: Specialized Multi-Generator Adversarial Learning for Rare Failure Detection in Predictive Maintenance
Supervised learning models in the predictive maintenance field are regularly trained on highly imbalanced industrial datasets: machine failures occur rarely but have a disproportionate effect on operations. In addition to the clear class disparity, failure data are typically non-homogeneous, with different failure modes arising from distinct physical processes and exhibiting a multimodal distribution across minorities and classes. Traditional imbalance-management methods, e.g., undersampling, SMOTE-based interpolation, or cost-sensitive learning, typically assume that the minority population is homogeneous. This means their effectiveness is severely limited in the multifaceted conditions encountered in industrial practice. This paper determines the possibility of a failure-type-conscious generative augmentation program to improve the identification of infrequent failures in predictive maintenance systems. An experimental design that is leakage-safe is used to compare five imbalance-handling methods: cost-sensitive learning, random undersampling, SMOTE oversampling, single-generator GAN augmentation, and a specialized multi-generator GAN architecture that has independent generators that are asked to learn individual failure subtypes. Precision/Recall-oriented measures are used to quantify model performance; the main evaluation measure is the PR-AUC. Experiments conducted on the AI4I 2020 predictive maintenance dataset indicate that the proposed multi-generator GAN framework produces more realistic minority samples, yielding higher PR-AUC and recall scores compared to traditional resampling methods and individual-generator GAN augmentation.