Identifying nonlinear variation patterns with deep autoencoders

The discovery of nonlinear variation patterns in high-dimensional profile data is an important task in many quality control and manufacturing settings. We present an automated method for discovering nonlinear variation patterns using deep autoencoders. The approach provides a functional mapping from a low-dimensional representation to the original spatially-dense feature space of the profile data that is both interpretable and efficient with respect to preserving information. We compare our deep autoencoder approach to several other methods for discovering variation patterns in profile data. Our results indicate that deep autoencoders consistently outperform the alternative approaches in reproducing the original profiles from the learned variation sources.