Cable incipient fault identification using restricted Boltzmann machine and stacked autoencoder

Cable incipient fault is an intermittent arc fault, and may evolve into a permanent fault. Due to the short duration of the fault, the conventional overcurrent protection device cannot detect it. A cable incipient fault identification method is proposed in this study, using restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) and stacked autoencoder (SAE). Firstly, disturbance current waveforms data is effectively compressed by RBM, which can improve analysis efficiency and obtain the shallow features of the data. Then, the compressed data is used as the input of SAE, and the optimal network parameters are obtained through layer-by-layer pre-training and fine-tuning. Finally, a well-trained SAE network is used to learn deep features from the input data to identify cable incipient fault, and softmax outputs identification result. In addition, the performance of the proposed method is compared with other methods. The accuracy of the proposed method is 98.33/95.62% for simulated data/measured data, and is 1.66/1.09%, 3.33/1.76%, 17.31/28.48% and 40.17/46.1% higher than the accuracies of convolutional neural network, deep belief network, random forest and back propagation neural network, respectively. The results show that the proposed method has high identification accuracy and feasibility.