Tucker Decomposition-Based Feature Selection and SSA-Optimized Multi- Kernel SVM for Transformer Fault Diagnosis

LP Wang and XL Liu, SENSORS, 25, 7547 (2025).

DOI: 10.3390/s25247547

Accurate fault diagnosis of power transformers is critical for maintaining grid reliability, yet conventional dissolved gas analysis (DGA) methods face challenges in feature representation and high- dimensional data processing. This paper presents an intelligent diagnostic framework that synergistically integrates systematic feature engineering, tensor decomposition-based feature selection, and a sparrow search algorithm (SSA)-optimized multi-kernel support vector machine (MKSVM) for transformer fault classification. The proposed approach first expands the original five-dimensional gas concentration measurements to a twelve-dimensional feature space by incorporating domain-driven IEC 60599 ratio indicators and statistical aggregation descriptors, effectively capturing nonlinear interactions among gas components. Subsequently, a novel Tucker decomposition framework is developed to construct a three-way tensor encoding sample-feature-class relationships, where feature importance is quantified through both discriminative power and structural significance in low-rank representations, successfully reducing dimensionality from twelve to seven critical features while retaining 95% of discriminative information. The multi-kernel SVM architecture combines radial basis function, polynomial, and sigmoid kernels with optimized weights and hyperparameters configured through SSA's hierarchical producer-scrounger search mechanism. Experimental validation on DGA samples across seven fault categories demonstrates that the proposed method achieves 98.33% classification accuracy, significantly outperforming existing methods, including kernel PCA-based approaches, deep learning models, and ensemble techniques. The framework establishes a reliable and accurate solution for transformer condition monitoring in power systems.

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