Hyperparameter example: Micro-fractures on turbine blades | Vose Software

Hyperparameter example: Micro-fractures on turbine blades

Your company manufactures gas turbines for power stations. One of the key performance characteristics is that the turbine blades do not, with high probability, develop micro-fractures beyond size X within an operation period T. There are 200 blades in a turbine. You test 30 turbines for the required period T, and perform an inspection of the blades using a sonic scanner. The inspection method is not foolproof: it has a 20% chance of failing to detect a fracture that is there. Your study identified 3 fractures. What is the probability that a turbine satisfies the performance requirement?

 

Contacting the manufacturer of the sonic scanner, you find that actually they are not so sure about this 20% failure rate: it is based on a study where 4 of 5 fractures were detected. How does this affect your estimate of the probability that a turbine satisfies the performance requirement?

If p is the probability that a turbine blade fails within the period T, then the probability that a turbine fails to meet the required performance specification P(TurbineFail) is given by:

P(TurbineFail) = 1-(1-P(BladeFail))200

assuming that each blade fails independently of the others in a turbine. How can we estimate P(BladeFail)?

Two methods are presented below that yield the same posterior distribution.

Method 1:   simulation model

We tested 30 * 200 = 6000 blades, of which 3 failed. That leads to an estimate of:

P(BladeFail) = Beta(3+1,6000-3+1)

from estimation of the probability of success of a binomial trial. However, we are unsure of the number of blades F that actually failed:

                F = 3 + NegBin(3+1,0.8)

from the estimation of the number of binomial trials to observe a certain number of successes. This is a good approximation when F is much smaller than the population of 6000 blades (as it is here) but wouldn't work well otherwise because the NegBin distribution has an infinite tail, and could produce more failures than we have blades.

We are also uncertain about the 20% failure rate (80% success rate) of detection P(detect):

P(detect) = Beta(4+1,5-4+1) = Beta(5,2)

Putting these altogether we get:

F = 3 + NegBin(4, Beta(5,2))

 

P(BladeFail) = Beta(F+1,6000-F+1)

P(TurbineFail) = 1-(1- P(BladeFail))200

with the following result:

The graph shows that we are 90% confident that the probability a turbine fails within period T is less than 29.4%.

The object of this analysis was to determine P(BladeFail) and from that determine P(TurbineFail). A Bayesian estimate of P(BladeFail) required the parameter F, which was uncertain. The distribution for F is a hyperparameter. By using simulation to arrive at P(BladeFail) we have a natural way of integrating the extra uncertainty that F introduces into the calculation.

Method 2: construction model

We can construct a confidence distribution for P(BladeFail) = q as follows:

Uniform(0,1) prior:

p(q) = 1

Binomial likelihood function:

                =VoseBinomialProb(3,6000,q*0.8,0)

which calculates the probability we would observe exactly (last parameter =0) 3 failed blades out of 6000 when the probability of a blade failing (q) and then being observed (0.8) is q*0.8. Note that imbedding the observation probability 0.8 factor will work for all values of the problem, and is therefore superior to the NegBin method used in the simulation approach.

This leads to the following posterior distribution:

From that analysis, ModelRisk's Relative distribution can then be used to sample values from the uncertainty distribution, as shown in the accompanying model. The analysis has not yet taken into account the uncertainty around P(detect), but we can do this with numerical integration. We can create a spreadsheet cell that simulates P(detect), as before:

P(detect) = Beta(4+1,5-4+1) = Beta(5,2)

and then link it to the VoseBinomialProb likelihood calculation. The VoseSimMean function can be used to calculate the posterior after this hyperparameter has been taken into account:

If you did not need a posterior distribution for P(BladeFail), the extra step of using the mean function is unnecessary: it is sufficient to simply run a simulation that samples from the Beta distribution for P(detect), constructs the Relative distribution for P(BladeFail), samples from that Relative distribution and calculates a value for P(TurbineFail), your output. All options are demonstrated in the accompanying model.

See Also

 

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