RP-CATE: Recurrent Perceptron-based Channel Attention Transformer Encoder for Industrial Hybrid Modeling

Nowadays, industrial hybrid modeling which integrates both mechanistic modeling and machine learning-based modeling techniques has attracted increasing interest from scholars due to its high accuracy, low computational cost, and satisfactory interpretability. Nevertheless, the existing industrial hybrid modeling methods still face two main limitations. First, current research has mainly focused on applying a single machine learning method to one specific task, failing to develop a comprehensive machine learning architecture suitable for modeling tasks, which limits their ability to effectively represent complex industrial scenarios. Second, industrial datasets often contain underlying associations (e.g., monotonicity or periodicity) that are not adequately exploited by current research, which can degrade model's predictive performance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the Recurrent Perceptron-based Channel Attention Transformer Encoder (RP-CATE), with three distinctive characteristics: 1: We developed a novel architecture by replacing the self-attention mechanism with channel attention and incorporating our proposed Recurrent Perceptron (RP) Module into Transformer, achieving enhanced effectiveness for industrial modeling tasks compared to the original Transformer. 2: We proposed a new data type called Pseudo-Image Data (PID) tailored for channel attention requirements and developed a cyclic sliding window method for generating PID. 3: We introduced the concept of Pseudo-Sequential Data (PSD) and a method for converting industrial datasets into PSD, which enables the RP Module to capture the underlying associations within industrial dataset more effectively. An experiment aimed at hybrid modeling in chemical engineering was conducted by using RP-CATE and the experimental results demonstrate that RP-CATE achieves the best performance compared to other baseline models.