Int. J. Quality Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2017 123 Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Fault diagnosis for a milk pasteurisation plant with missing data Ouahab Kadri* Department of Computer Science and Math, University of Khenchela, Algeria Email: ouahabk@yahoo.fr *Corresponding author L.H. Mouss and Adel Abdelhadi Automatic and Computer Integrated Manufacturing Laboratory, University of Batna 2, Algeria Email: hayet_mouss@yahoo.fr Email: abdelhadi.adel@gmail.com Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of fault diagnosis from observed data containing missing values amongst the inputs. In order to provide good classification accuracy for the decision function, a novel approach based on support vector machine and extreme learning machine is developed. SVM mixture model is used to model the data distribution, which is adapted to handle missing values, while extreme learning machine enables to devise a multiple imputation strategy for final estimation. In order to prove the efficiency of our proposed method, we have developed the classifier using the condition monitoring observations from milk pasteurisation data. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm gives improved results compared to recent methods, essentially if the number of missing data is significant. The results show that our approach can perfectly detect dysfunction, identify the fault, and is strong in unsupervised process monitoring. Keywords: fault diagnosis; missing data; support vector machine mixture; extreme learning machine; ELM; multiple imputation; least squares; process monitoring; milk pasteurisation; classification; multiclass problem. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Kadri, O., Mouss, L.H. and Abdelhadi, A. (2017) ‘Fault diagnosis for a milk pasteurisation plant with missing data’, Int. J. Quality Engineering and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp.123–136. Biographical notes: Ouahab Kadri received his PhD from the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Batna, Algeria, in 2013. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Khenchela, Algeria. He received his Magister degree from Department of Computer Science, University of Batna, Algeria. He has published two books and over 20 papers. His current research interests include evolutionary computation and artificial intelligence.