A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Classifiers in Oil-Immersed Power Transformer Fault Diagnosis

Abstract

The most common fault diagnosis method for oil-immersed power transformers is dissolved gas analysis (DGA). Doernenburg ratios, Rogers ratios, IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) ratios, and Duval's triangle are conventional DGA techniques for insulating oil in power transformers. In this study, Scikit-learn known as a popular open-source free machine learning tool for Python programming language has been used to develop different machine learning (ML) classifiers to effectively detect defects in oil-immersed power transformers. These classifiers are Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, Gaussian Naive Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbours, Random Forests, and Multi-Layer Perceptron. The input vector of each classifier has been formed by Doernenburg ratios, Rogers ratios, IEC ratios, and CSUS (California State University Sacramento) method. After these classifiers are completely trained, unseen DGA data sets are then used to evaluate their performances. Based on a statistical analysis, the study can indicate the most effective type of the input vector and ML classifier for precisely detecting faults in power transformers.