A novel architecture called the growing wavelet based hidden Markov tree (gHMT) for batch process monitoring
is proposed. It characterizes process measurements by the growing and learning procedure. It starts with a
small size wavelet based hidden Markov tree (HMT) and successively increments the size of the wavelet tree
until the desirable size is reached. Like HMT, this modeling scheme in the wavelet domain can not only
analyze the measurements at multiple scales in time and frequency but also capture the statistical behavior of
the real-world measurements at different scales. Unlike HMT with a structure covering the whole frequency
range, gHMT has the ability to explicitly control over the complexity of the HMT architecture, retaining the
smallest possible size and the accuracy of the model without introducing additional computational load. With
the smallest possible size of the structure, it still has the capability of representing the underlying data
distribution with the desired accuracy. After the gHMT model extracts the past operating information, it can
be used to generate simple monitoring charts, easily tracking and monitoring the occurrence of observable
upsets. The development and implementation of the gHMT for batch monitoring are illustrated through a
fed-batch penicillin cultivation example to help readers delve into the matter. Also, the comparisons between
the existing statistical process control (SPC) methods, the conventional HMT method, and the gHMT method
are demonstrated to explain the advantages of our newly proposed method.