CLAIRE: Compressed Latent Autoencoder for Industrial Representation and Evaluation—A Deep Learning Framework for Smart Manufacturing

Accurate fault detection in high-dimensional industrial environments remains a major challenge due to the inherent complexity, noise, and redundancy in sensor data. This article introduces compressed latent autoencoder for industrial representation and evaluation (CLAIRE), that is, a hybrid end-to-end learning framework that integrates unsupervised deep representation learning with supervised classification for intelligent quality control in smart manufacturing systems. It employs an optimized deep autoencoder to transform raw input into a compact latent space, effectively capturing the intrinsic data structure while suppressing irrelevant or noisy features. The learned representations are then fed into a downstream classifier to perform binary fault prediction. Experimental results on a high-dimensional dataset demonstrate that CLAIRE significantly outperforms conventional classifiers trained directly on raw features. Moreover, it incorporates a post hoc phase, using a game-theory-based interpretability technique, to analyze the latent space and identify the most informative input features contributing to fault predictions. The proposed framework highlights the potential of integrating explainable artificial intelligence with feature-aware regularization for robust fault detection. The modular and interpretable nature of the proposed framework makes it highly adaptable, offering promising applications in other domains characterized by complex, high-dimensional data, e.g., healthcare, finance, and environmental monitoring.