Partial Discharge Severity Classification for Transformer Condition Monitoring Using Feature Engineering, PCA, and ANN

Partial discharge (PD) is a key indicator of insulation degradation in high-voltage transformers and can provide early warning of incipient failure. Although artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been applied to PD classification, their performance may be affected by redundant features and overfitting when using expanded feature spaces. This study proposes a PD severity classification framework that combines physics-informed feature engineering, principal component analysis (PCA), and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network. PD measurements were acquired from a physical transformer using the IEC 60270 electrical measurement method, yielding 294 samples labelled into four severity classes: normal, low, medium, and high PD. Two measured variables, namely PD magnitude and applied voltage, were expanded into a 10-dimensional feature space using energy-based, ratio-based, logarithmic, and normalized features. PCA was then used to reduce the feature space, and the retained principal components were used as inputs to the classifier. The results show that the first two principal components captured more than 90% of the total variance and enabled the MLP to achieve 98.3% test accuracy, matching the performance obtained using all 10 engineered features and improving on classification based on the raw measurements alone (91.5%). The proposed PCA-ANN model also achieved perfect precision and recall for the medium- and high-severity classes on the test set, and outperformed K-nearest neighbours, support vector machine, and Gaussian Naïve Bayes models in 5-fold cross-validation. These findings indicate that PCA can reduce feature dimensionality without loss of diagnostic performance, providing an efficient approach for transformer PD severity classification.