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An Overview of State-of-the-Art Partial Discharge Analysis Techniques for

Condition Monitoring

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 F E A T U R
An Overview of State-of-the-Art Partial
Discharge Analysis Techniques
for Condition Monitoring
Key words: partial discharge, condition monitoring, sensor, feature extraction, pattern recognition
Introduction
As one step toward the future smart grid, condition monitor-
ing is important to facilitate the reliability of grid asset opera-
tion and to save on maintenance cost [1]. Most failures of the
power grid are caused by electrical insulation failure, and a key
indicator of such electrical failure is the occurrence of partial
discharge (PD). Therefore, one focus of condition monitoring is
to detect PD, especially in the early stages, to prevent a serious
power failure or outage [2].
PD is an electrical discharge that occurs across a portion of the
insulation between two conductors, without completely bridging
the conductors. PD is harmful because it causes progressive de-
terioration of power apparatus and insulation, ultimately leading
to equipment failure. Therefore, detecting PD and differentiat-
ing PD from noise are important tasks of condition monitoring
to facilitate grid asset operation and timely maintenance. In ad-
dition, PD can take place at both AC and DC voltages; however,
because AC voltage systems are much more common and PD at
DC voltage is less harmful [3], [4], this article focuses only on
PD at AC voltage.
Given that PD happens in various insulation systems, various
types of PD can be captured [5]–[7], such as corona, discharge
in oil, surface discharge, internal discharge, slot discharge, de-
lamination discharge, and discharge due to floating particles in
gas-insulated systems. Corona discharges generally happen in
open air and produce a current originating from an electrode
with a high voltage. Surface discharges are produced along the
surface of the insulation. Internal discharges take place inside
the solid insulations with gas-filled cavities or near the contami-
nants. In addition, internal discharges are more harmful than sur-
face discharges and corona [8]. As such, discriminating different
types of PD would provide an initial assessment on the severity
of a deteriorated spot where PD is happening.
Nowadays, automatic detection of PD is made possible
largely due to advanced sensing technology and data analytic
22 0883-7554/15/©2015/IEEE
E A R T I C L E
Min Wu, Hong Cao, Jianneng Cao,
Hai-Long Nguyen, João Bártolo Gomes,
and Shonali Priyadarsini Krishnaswamy
Data Analytics Department, Institute for
Infocomm Research, A*STAR, 1 Fusionopolis
Way #21-01 Connexis, Singapore 138632
This article presents a comprehen-
sive survey for the state-of-the-art
knowledge on partial discharge
(PD) signal sensing, feature repre-
sentation for PD signals, and pattern
recognition techniques for PD data
analysis.
techniques. Typically, a PD monitoring system consists of two
components, i.e., a PD signal collection module and a data anal-
ysis module. PD emits energy in several ways, for example, pro-
ducing a current, electromagnetic radiation, light, heat, acoustic
waves, and so on. The PD signal collection module involves var-
ious sensors that are designed and deployed to capture a current
signal, electromagnetic radiation, light, heat, or acoustic signal.
The data analysis module is often equipped with advanced pat-
tern recognition techniques to help differentiate PD from noise,
and even to tell the specific sources of PD and locate them. Thus,
diagnosis strategies, for example sending out an alert, can be
IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine
Figure 1. Flowchart of the three components in a partial discharge (PD) monitoring system.
made with respect to the analysis results. In addition to these two
main components, feature extraction and representation for PD
signals can play an important role in data analysis, and we con-
sider it as an independent component. This survey will mainly
focus on the pipeline with the three components for PD data
collection, representation, and analysis as illustrated in Figure 1.
Detection and Localization for PD Signals
Based on different types of signals generated by PD, we
summarize the PD sensing methods into three main categories:
electrical, acoustic, and chemical detection [9]. In fact, PD also
generates heat, and thus, thermal detection for PD using temper-
ature sensors sounds practicable. However, temperature sensors
have not been used for PD detection in current literatures. Next,
we briefly introduce each detection method and the sensors in-
volved in each method. In addition, we also briefly introduce PD
localization in this section.
Electrical Detection
Electrical detection of PD is based on the electrical phenom-
ena accompanied by the discharge, including electromagnetic
radiation and electric current pulses.
Ultrahigh frequency (UHF) sensors or UHF antennas are able
to detect electromagnetic waves generated by PD (usually with
a frequency range from 300 MHz to 3 GHz). UHF sensors are
often applied to detect PD in gas-insulated systems and trans-
formers. UHF sensors offer the advantage that external noise
and disturbances can be shielded effectively. Therefore, UHF
sensors for PD signals have gained increasing attention recently
[10], [11]. In addition, transformers with different geometry in-
side will have different impedance, and UHF sensors thus need
to be recalibrated for different types of transformers.
High frequency current transformer (HFCT) sensors detect
the high frequency current pulses generated by PD. The frequen-
cy band of HFCT sensors is usually from hundreds of kilohertz
to dozens of megahertz, which has been proven to be capable of
capturing PD signals. HFCT sensors consist of a magnetic core
and screened windings, and they are clamped around the case
ground of the components (e.g., switchgears and cable termina-
tions) to measure the current pulses [12], [13]. HFCT sensors
November/December — Vol. 31, No. 6 23
with split cores can be conveniently applied to a high voltage
equipment without disconnecting any part of it, whereas those
with closed cores are generally for permanent monitoring and
need to be installed prior to the operation.
Acoustic Detection
Acoustic sensors can be used to detect sound waves gener-
ated by PD in sonic and ultrasonic range [14], [15]. Generally,
acoustic sensors are applied to detect PD in switchgears, gas-
insulated systems, and transformers. Acoustic sensors have sev-
eral advantages for detecting PD signals. First, they are easily
installed. For example, they can be conveniently mounted on the
outside of the tank wall of the transformer while the transformer
stays in full service. Second, acoustic sensors are immune to
electromagnetic interference. Third, acoustic sensors are gener-
ally associated with low price, but perform well for localizing
the PD sources [16]. Still, acoustic sensors suffer from their own
limitations, e.g., they are less sensitive due to background acous-
tic noise.
Fiber-optic acoustic sensors have been developed to increase
their sensitivity for signal detection. They are becoming high-
ly attractive for PD sensing due to their advantages (e.g., high
sensitivity, electrical nonconductivity, and immunity to electro-
magnetic interference). In [17]–[20], various fiber-optic acoustic
sensor systems have been designed for detecting and localizing
PD in transformers.
Chemical Detection
Chemical detection of PD is based on the fact that the dis-
charge may generate new chemical components via reactions.
Dissolved gas analysis (DGA) is the main chemical detection
method [21]–[23], and it focuses on analyzing dissolved gases in
the transformer oil. DGA methods include gas chromatography,
hydrogen on-line monitoring, and photo-acoustic spectroscopy
[23]. The distribution of these gases collected from the above
methods can help to identify different types of PD, based on the
existing IEC standards [23], [24].
Chemical detection is usually intrusive and performed for
oil-filled components, e.g., transformers. This limits its applica-
tions to other components. Furthermore, chemical detection is
not able to provide any information about the location of PD.

Figure 2. Multiple sensors (S1, S2, S3, and S4) mounted on a
transformer tank with a partial discharge (PD) inside.
PD Source Localization
Localizing PD sources accurately is valuable for maintenance
and repairing purposes. Figure 2 shows an example transformer
tank where a PD is inside and several sensors are placed outside.
The task for PD localization here is basically to compute the
Cartesian coordinates (x, y, z) of the PD. Arrival time analysis
is a common method to localize the PD sources [14], [25], [26].
Next, we introduce a common approach based on arrival time
analysis.
Assume that S1 is a reference sensor and the arrival time of
PD at S1 is T (T here is unknown). Since we are able to collect
the arrival time difference τ1i between S1 and Si (i >1), we can
have the following Equation 1. With four equations (i.e., 1 ≤
i ≤ 4), we can thus calculate (x, y, z) of the PD as well as the
arrival time T at the reference sensor. Note that, v in Equation
1 is the sound velocity for acoustic measurement systems [27]
and the light velocity for UHF sensor systems [25], [26], re-
spectively. In addition, we are able to locate the PD with only 3
equations when the arrival time T is known, and this scenario is
also known as triangulation, which is used in global positioning
systems (GPS).
(x − xsi)2 + (y − ysi)2 + (z − zsi)2 = (T + τ1i)2 × v2 (1)
As introduced above, both UHF sensors [25], [26] and acous-
tic sensors [14], [27] can be used for PD localization. In addition,
HFCT sensors can be used for PD localization in crosslinked
polyethylene cables based on the time domain reflectometry
Table 1. The features for various partial discharge detection methods and sensors
Ultrahigh frequency
Item sensors
Signals Electromagnetic waves
Signal frequency 0.300–3 GHz
Installation difficulty Moderate
Ability to localize partial discharge Limited
1
NA = not applicable.
24 IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine
method [28], and the details of the time domain reflectometry
method are not introduced here. Basically, acoustic sensors ob-
viously achieved much better performance then UHF sensors for
PD localization. For example, the location error achieved in [26]
using UHF sensors was 14.33 cm, while the dimension of the
transformer tank was 71.5 × 118 × 95 cm. With transformers
having similar size, the location error using acoustic sensors in
[14] and [19] was 5.4 and 6 cm, respectively.
Summary for PD Detection and Localization
Various sensor systems have their own advantages and limita-
tions. For example, UHF sensors have high sensitivity for sig-
nal detection while fiber-optic acoustic sensors have advantages
of high sensitivity, electrical nonconductivity, and immunity to
electromagnetic interference. As shown in [29], the signals de-
tected by acoustic sensors were significantly attenuated within
the cable joint. Meanwhile, the detection sensitivity of radio
frequency current transformer sensors (similar to HFCT sen-
sors but with lower frequency range) was not good, and thus
the authors in [29] further applied a wavelet denoising method
to increase the signal-to-noise ratio for the signals from radio
frequency current transformer sensors.
Feature Representation for PD Signals
For PD signals from the PD detectors in Table 1, we generally
represent them in two different patterns, namely, time-resolved
patterns and phase-resolved patterns, as shown in Figure 3. Fig-
ure 3(A) shows a time-resolved pattern, i.e., a q-t waveform,
where q is the amplitude (i.e., the apparent charge or discharge
voltage) and t shows the time information. Figure 3(B) demon-
strates a phase-resolved pattern, i.e., a φ-q-n pattern, where φ is
the phase angle for the PD pulse, q also refers to the apparent
charge or discharge voltage, and n is the number of pulses. Next,
we will introduce the features extracted from both waveforms
and phase-resolved patterns.
In addition, a common representation for phase-resolved
patterns is based on the phase-window method in [6], [7], [30],
[31]. The phase-window method divides the power cycle with
360° into several small phase windows and then generates some
features for each phase window. For example, we have 360 win-
dows if each phase window has a size of 1°. Assume that we
have three features for each phase window, namely, the number
of pulses, maximal amplitude, and the average amplitude in this
High frequency current Optical acoustic Dissolved gas
transformer sensors sensors analysis
Electrical current pulse Acoustic waves NA1
3–30 MHz 10–300 kHz NA
Easy Easy Moderate
Limited Yes No
 Figure 3. (A) Time-resolved pattern (waveform) and (B) phase-resolved pattern.

phase window. We can thus represent the phase-resolved pattern
with a 360 × 3 = 1,080 dimensional vector. Due to the curse of
dimensionality, it is difficult to analyze, understand, and visual-
ize such high dimensional data (e.g., 1,080 dimensional data as
introduced above). Feature extraction techniques for dimension-
ality reduction would thus be important before we can analyze
the PD data. In this section, we will also introduce principal
component analysis (PCA) and t-distributed stochastic neighbor
embedding (t-SNE) for feature dimensionality reduction.
Pulse Characteristics
Figure 4 shows an example PD pulse and typical features
to describe the pulse shape. Assuming that the maximum am-
plitude of the pulse is A, we can extract the following features
to describe the pulse shape from the waveform, e.g., pulse rise
time, decay time, and pulse width (duration) [32].
• Pulse rise time (tr): time required to increase from 0.1A to
0.9A
• Pulse decay time (td): time required to decrease from 0.9A
to 0.1A
• Pulse width (tw): the time interval between 0.5A on both
sides
Statistical Features
Given a set of pulses, phase-resolved pattern is a good repre-
sentation for them as mentioned above. The phase-resolved pat-
tern is first divided into many phase windows, e.g., each phase
window has 1° and we can thus have 360 phase windows. We
can then extract some features in each phase window, e.g., the
number of pulses, maximum amplitude, and average amplitude.
The statistical moments of these features over all the phase win-
dows can be extracted to further represent the given set of pulses
[32].
Assume that we have N phase windows, and xi is a specific
feature value for the ith phase window. The mean of xi over these
N
N phase windows would be µ = ∑ i =1 x i / N . If we consider
that phase windows may have different importance [let p(xi) be
the importance of the ith phase window], the weighted mean is
thus computed in Equation 2. For simplicity, the other statistics,
e.g., variance (σ2), skewness (γ), and kurtosis (κ), are all defined
as follows without considering the importance for phase win-
dows [33], [34].

N
∑ x i p (x i )    
Weighted mean (w ∝) : w ∝ =  i =N1 (2)
∑ i =1p (x i )
N 2
2
Variance (σ ) : σ 2 ∑ (x i − µ )
=  i =1   (3)
N
N 3
∑ (x i − µ )
Skewness (γ ): γ = i =1 (4)
σ 3 ×N

Figure 4. Typical features to describe the shape of a partial dis- N 4

charge pulse. tr = pulse rise time; tw = pulse width; td = pulse Kurtosis (κ ): κ   =
∑ i =1 (x i − µ ) −3 (5)
decay time. σ 4 ×N

November/December — Vol. 31, No. 6 25

 In the above definitions, skewness and kurtosis are calculated
with respect to a reference normal distribution. Skewness is a
measure of asymmetry or degree of tilt of the data with respect
to normal distribution, which has a skewness of zero. Negative
values for the skewness indicate data that are skewed left (the
left tail is longer than the right tail), and positive values indi-
cate data that are skewed right. Kurtosis is an indicator of sharp-
ness of distribution. If a distribution has the same sharpness as
normal distribution, the kurtosis is zero. Negative values for
kurtosis indicate a distribution flatter than normal distribution,
whereas positive values indicate a sharper distribution.
PD pulses generally occur in both positive and negative
halves of the voltage cycle. Several features can be extracted to
tell the differences between two halves. Please refer to [32] for
the details of such features, e.g., discharge asymmetry and cross-
correlation factor.
Recall that we use a feature vector with 1,080 dimensions to
represent a set of pulses based on the phase-window method,
i.e., 360 phase windows × 3 features from the phase-resolved
pattern. Now, we consider three features from the phase-re-
solved pattern as three distributions, and we have four of the
above statistical features, i.e., mean, variance, skewness, and
kurtosis, which are calculated separately for these three distribu-
tions. Note that all these features are calculated for positive and
negative voltage cycles. Hence, we have 3 × 4 × 2 = 24 features.
In addition, we have six features from discharge asymmetry and
cross-correlation factor. In total, we extract 30 features based on
the statistical moments. As such, the feature dimension for a set
of pulses is much reduced, comparing with 1,080 features based
on the phase-window method.
Signal Processing Method
Wavelet transform is a common signal processing method for
various signals including audio signals, images, and so on. It is
particularly suitable to analyze irregular and nonperiodical sig-
nals. In this section, we focus on its application for extracting
features for PD data.
A wavelet ψ(t) is a small wave-type signal with an aver-
+∞
age value of zero (i.e., ∫ ψ (t )dt = 0) and a finite energy
−∞
+∞ 2 × (2k+1 − 1) features and feature selection is needed for further
(i.e., ∫−∞ [ψ (t )] dt < ∞). The continuous wavelet transform
Figure 5. The iterative decomposition process of discrete wavelet transform.
26 IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine
(CWT) of a signal f(t) with respect to a wavelet ψ(t) is defined
as follows:
+∞
1 t − b 
CWT (a, b ) =
a
∫ f (t )ψ   a 
 dt , (6)
−∞
where a is a scale factor and b is a translation factor. The scale
factor is for compressing and stretching the mother wavelet,
whereas the translation factor is for shifting the wavelet function
ψ(t) along the time axis. Both a and b are continuous variables
in CWT.
If we set a = 2j and b = n × a in Equation 6 with n and j being
integers, we then derive a discrete wavelet transform (DWT).
DWT can be implemented by a well-known pyramidal algo-
rithm based on multiresolution analysis as shown in Figure 5. A
signal is decomposed to an approximation signal and a detailed
signal by half-band low-pass and high-pass filters, respectively.
The approximation signal can be further decomposed to two sig-
nals iteratively. As such, a k-level DWT generates (k + 1) signals
(cD1, ···, cDk, cAk), where cDi is the detailed signal at ith level,
1 ≤ i ≤ k, and cAk is the approximation signal at kth level. Simi-
lar to DWT, wavelet packet transform (WPT) is another type of
wavelet transform where the signal in each level will be decom-
posed to two signals by two half-band filters. Thus, for k-level
decomposition, WPT produces 2k different signals.
In [35], an original PD signal S was transformed to n de-
composition signals (dS1, ···, dSn) by DWT. A decomposi-
tion signal dSi has an energy Ei = ∑ dSi (t )2 . S is then rep-
t
resented by a normalized energy vector (E1′ , , En′ ), where
Ei′ = Ei / (∑ n
j =1 )
E j . Those energy coefficients for PD data
were generated to discriminate different types of PD sources via
clustering in [35].
k-Level WPT was applied to generate 2k decomposition sig-
nals for an original PD signal S in [7], [36], [37]. In [36], the
authors calculate energy, skewness, and kurtosis for these 2k
decomposition signals, as well as 2k − 1 intermediate signals.
However, each PD signal has a large number of features, i.e., 3
analysis in this paper. In [37], [7], each level will be assigned 4
features, namely, mean (µi), variance (σ i2), skewness (γi), and
kurtosis (κi) for the signals in this level. Hence, original PD sig-
nals are assigned with 4k features (k = 9 and thus 36 features in
[37], [7]). Note that the statistical moments here were derived
for waveforms from the distribution of discharge amplitude
against the time.
PCA
Principal component analysis is a common statistical tech-
nique for feature extraction and dimensionality reduction [38].
We can represent m data instances with n features as a data
matrix εRm×n. Assuming that X is normalized (each column with
mean 0), C = (1/n)X TX is the covariance matrix of X. Here, X T
is the transpose of X and C ∈ Rm×n. Subsequently, we calculate
the eigenvalues and eigenvectors for C based on eigenvalue
decomposition. For example, λ is an eigenvalue and vεRn×1 is
its corresponding eigenvector if λv = Cv. We then select top-p
eigenvalues and their eigenvectors, and V = Rn×p is the matrix
consisting of these p eigenvectors (p < n). Finally, the data from
n-dimension space X is mapped to p-dimension space Xpca by
Xpca = XV.
PCA for Waveform Data
In [39], each PD pulse was represented by its waveform as
a 2,000-dimension vector (2,000 points during 20-μs sampling
period). PCA was then applied to reduce the feature dimension
from 2,000 to 2 to visualize and group PD pulses. In [40], each
PD pulse was represented by its waveform as a 5,000-dimen-
sion vector. Transformation of the PD pulses from time domain
(waveforms) to frequency domain via Fourier transform reduced
the dimension of each signal from 5,000 to 2,500. PCA further
reduced the feature dimension from 2,500 to 6 for hierarchical
cluster analysis. In [35], wavelet decomposition on the wave-
form of a PD pulse generated a number of wavelet energy coef-
ficients (e.g., 6 energy coefficients) for this pulse. PCA further
reduced the dimensionality from 6 to 3 for PD visualization and
clustering.
PCA for Phase-Resolved Data
In [7], the feature vector for the phase-resolved pattern as
shown in Figure 3(B) was with 600 dimensions (200 phase win-
dows × 3 features in each phase window). PCA then reduced
the dimensionality from 600 to 7 for PD source classification.
In [41], [6], each phase-resolved pattern had a feature vector
with 1,440 dimensions (360 phase windows × 4 features in each
phase window). PCA was similarly used for dimensionality re-
duction for PD source classification.
t-SNE
t-SNE is another dimensionality reduction technique that was
recently developed for visualizing high-dimensional data [42].
t-SNE aims to project the data to the low-dimensional space and
retain their pairwise distance or similarity. For this purpose, t-
SNE first constructs a probability distribution P over pairs of
high-dimensional objects in such a way that two similar objects
have a high probability score, while dissimilar points have a low
probability score. Let pij denote the probability for the pair (xi,
xj) in high-dimensional space. Similarly, t-SNE defines a prob-
November/December — Vol. 31, No. 6 27
ability distribution Q over the points in the low-dimensional
map, and qij is the probability for the corresponding pair (yi, yj)
in low-dimensional space. Given that two probability distribu-
tions P and Q are similar or close, two close points xi and xj
in high-dimensional space are likely to be nearby in the lower-
dimensional space. Hence, t-SNE uses Kullback-Leibler (KL)
divergence in Equation 7 to measure the distance between the
two distributions P and Q. By minimizing the KL divergence
between P and Q, t-SNE thus reduces the dimensionality for
original data and retains their pairwise distance or similarity.
pij
KL ( P || Q ) = ∑pij log   (7)
qij
i ≠j
In [43], wavelet decomposition on the waveform of a PD
pulse generates 10 wavelet energy coefficients for this pulse.
t-SNE further reduces the dimensionality from 10 to 3 for PD
pulse visualization and clustering. In [7], the feature vector for
each phase-resolved pattern is with 600 dimensions, and t-SNE
then reduces the dimensionality from 600 to 7 for PD source
classification.
Summary
Table 2 summarizes the features introduced above into two
categories. For a specific feature extraction method, we also list
in the table the references where it was used for PD data analy-
sis.
The first category of features are derived directly from the
waveforms or the phase-resolved patterns, and the second type
of features are those generated by feature dimensionality reduc-
tion techniques, e.g., PCA and t-SNE. These two types of fea-
tures have their own advantages. The first type of features have
clearer physical meanings and may achieve better performance
for PD data analysis than the second type of features. For exam-
ple in [7], DWT for feature extraction from waveforms provides
the best set of features. Statistical operators (e.g., skewness, kur-
tosis, etc.) are the second best set of features, which are better
than those generated by PCA and kernal PCA. The second type
of features are generally with low dimensionality and are easy
for visualization. However, they are generally the combination
of original features, and thus it is hard to interpret their physical
meanings.
PD Clustering
After PD signals are represented in feature space, we are able
to analyze them based on both unsupervised and supervised pat-
tern recognition techniques. In this section, we introduce various
methods for clustering PD signals (unsupervised methods). In
the next section, we will introduce different models for classify-
ing PD signals (supervised methods).
Clustering algorithms divide objects into groups, such that
objects in the same group are more similar to each other than
to those from a different group. PD pulses from the same PD
source tend to have similar characteristics (e.g., similar wave-
forms or phase-resolved patterns). Clustering algorithms are
thus widely used for separating multiple PD sources.
 Table 2. Feature extraction for partial discharge signals1
Type I: Features extracted directly from the waveforms or phase-resolved (PR) patterns
Data pattern Method
Waveforms Pulse shape
DWT and WPT
Fourier transform
PR patterns Phase window method
Statistical features
Type II: Features derived from dimensionality reduction techniques
Technique Data pattern
PCA Waveforms
PR patterns
t-SNE Waveforms
PR patterns
1
DWT = discrete wavelet transform; WPT = wavelet packet transform; PCA = principal component analysis; t-SNE = t-
distributed stochastic neighbor embedding.
K-Means
K-means is a widely used centroid-based clustering algo-
rithm. K is a user-specified parameter, i.e., the number of clus-
ters desired. It is an iterative refinement technique in the fol-
lowing steps. First, K initial centroids are randomly selected.
Second, K clusters are formed by assigning each object to its
closest centroid (assignment step). Third, the centroid of each
cluster is updated (update step). K-means clustering proceeds by
alternating between the assignment step and update step, until it
converges. In fact, the above iterative process is a heuristic algo-
rithm to minimize the optimization function in Equation 8. Here,
C = {C1, …, Ck} is the set of k clusters and oi is the centroid of
the cluster Ci.
k
2 Fuzzy C-Means
arg min ∑ ∑ x j − oi (8)
C
i =1 x j ∈C i
All the approaches [11], [44], [45], [54], [55] used K-means
algorithm to group signals into different clusters. Their differ-
ence is at the features extracted for clustering. In [44], PD sig-
nals were represented by a feature vector with the statistics of
the phase-resolved patterns (i.e., skewness, kurtosis, asymmetry,
and cross-correlation factor). In [54], the authors proposed nor-
malized auto-correlation function for recorded signals, which
summarizes both time and frequency domain features. In addi-
tion, the similarity between two signals is measured by the Pear-
son correlation coefficient between their normalized auto-corre-
lation functions. In [45], the authors first extracted the features
for the pulse shape (e.g., pulse rise and decay time, maximum
amplitude, and so on) and generated clusters with K-means.
Then, they merged clusters based on the distribution range of
28 IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine
References
[44]–[48]
[7] [35]–[37]
[40]
[6] [7] [30] [31]
[6] [7] [41] [44] [49] [50] [51]
References
[35] [39] [40] [52]
[6] [7] [41] [49] [51]
[53] [43]
[7]
the pulse equivalent frequencies to achieve optimal clustering
results. In [11], nine features were extracted for signals recorded
by UHF sensors, based mainly on the amplitude and time inter-
vals between two consecutive pulses. In [55], PD pulses were
represented by their amplitudes and phase angles, and rules were
applied to tell the PD source for each cluster based on its shape.
K-means is simple and efficient clustering method that is
widely used. However, K-means also has two limitations. On
one hand, it may converge to local minimum of Equation 8.
On the other hand, we need to specify the number of clusters k,
while it is often challenging to predetermine the right number
of clusters since we may have no idea about the number of PD
sources.
Fuzzy C-means (FCM) is a soft version of K-means, where
each object has a fuzzy degree of belonging to each cluster [56].
Here, “soft” clustering means that an object can be assigned to
multiple clusters. In FCM, the optimization function in Equation
9 is extended from Equation 8.
k N
2
arg min ∑∑pijm ⋅ x j − oi (9)
P ,C
i =1 j =1
In Equation 9, C = {C1, …, Ck} is the set of k clusters and oi
is the center of the cluster Ci. P = {pij} (1 ≤ i ≤ k, 1 ≤ j ≤ N, N is
the total number of objects) and pij shows the probability of the
object xj belonging to the cluster Ci. In addition, m is a parameter
that controls how much the weight is given to the closest center.
Using Lagrange multipliers, FCM computes P and C by itera-
tively updating pij and oi in Equation 10 until they are converged.
 2 (
2/ m −1)
 
−1
k  x j − oi
(pij ) = ∑  
 2 
l =1  x j − ol  feature dimensionality reduction (e.g., the number of features
N
∑ j =1x j ⋅ pijm
and    oi = N
. (10)
∑ j =1pijm generate overlapping PD clusters (i.e., some PD signals were
In [51], 26 statistical features were extracted from the phase-
resolved patterns, and 11 principle features were further ob-
tained by applying PCA. The authors then applied FCM and
its two variants, kernel fuzzy c-means and probabilistic fuzzy
c-means, for PD data clustering. They draw two interesting con-
clusions in this paper. First, 11 principle features identified by
PCA performed better than the original 26 features, i.e., feature
reduction by PCA helped various FCM. Second, probabilistic
fuzzy c-means achieved better results. In [57], [58], the authors
also applied FCM to PD pulses for separating their PD sources.
DBSCAN
DBSCAN is a well-known density-based clustering algo-
rithm [59]. It has two parameters ε and Nmin. Given a point P and
a distance metric d, N(P) = {Q | d(P,Q) ≤ ε} is the set of neigh-
bors of P, and we define that P and all the points in N(P) are con-
nected. If two different points X and Y are connected to a third
point Z, X and Y are also connected. If N(P) | ≥ Nmin, DBSCAN
generates a cluster from P by including all the points that are
connected to P (using bread-first search or depth-first search).
Once a cluster is identified, DBSCAN selects a new point P′ not
involved in any clusters and repeats the above procedure.
DBSCAN was exploited for clustering PD signals [35], [43],
[60]. In [35], raw waveforms for PD signals were first converted
to 6 decomposition coefficients by 5-level DWT. Each PD signal
was then represented by a 6-dimensional vector with the energy
coefficients. Principal component analysis further reduced the
feature dimensionality from 6 to 3. Finally, PD signals were
Table 3. Distance between two clusters A and B, Dist(A, B)
Name for Dist(A, B)
Single-nearest distance (single linkage)
Complete-farthest distance (complete linkage)
Average-average distance (average linkage or unweighted pair group method with average,
i.e., UPGMA)
Centroid distance (unweighted pair group method with centroid, i.e., UPGMC)
Ward’s criterion
November/December — Vol. 31, No. 6 29
clustered by DBSCAN and visualized in 3-D space. Similar
to [35], each PD signal was represented by energy coefficients
with 10 dimensions in [43]. The authors then applied t-SNE for
was reduced from 10 to 3) and DBSCAN for PD data cluster-
ing. The approach [60] extended the work in [54], which applied
K-means for PD clustering, and adapted DBSCAN instead to
allowed to be involved in multiple clusters).
Compared with K-means, DBSCAN has two advantages.
First, it does not require one to specify the number of clusters.
Second, it can find clusters with various shapes (e.g., those non-
linearly separable clusters), which may not be detected by K-
means.
Hierarchical Clustering
Hierarchical clustering is a clustering method that builds a
hierarchy of clusters in agglomerative (“bottom up”) or divisive
(“top down”) manners. As these two manners are reverse of each
other, next we only introduce the agglomerative hierarchical
clustering in details.
For agglomerative hierarchical clustering, each object is ini-
tially considered as an individual cluster. Based on various defi-
nitions of the distance between two clusters as shown in Table
3, two nearest clusters are then selected and merged. In Table
3, Dist(A, B) is the distance between two clusters A and B, and
dist(a, b) is the distance between two objects (e.g., Euclidean
distance, Manhattan distance, Mahalanobis distance, and so on).
In addition, ca and cb are the centroids of A and B, respectively.
The merge operation is repeated until all the objects are in the
same cluster or some stop criteria is satisfied.
Hierarchical clustering was used for PD data clustering in
[39], [40], [49]. In [40], raw waveforms with 5,000 samples were
converted to 6-dimensional feature vectors by Fourier transform
followed by PCA. The authors then applied hierarchical cluster-
ing to analyze PD signals. In particular, they considered 2 types
of distance between instances/PD signals (i.e., Euclidean and
Mahalanobis distance) and 2 types of distance between clusters
Formula
min dist ( a, b )
a ∈ A, b ∈ B
max dist ( a, b )
a ∈ A, b ∈ B
1
A B ΣΣdist ( a, b )
a ∈ Ab ∈B
dist ( ca , cb )
ΣΣdist ( a, b )
2
a ∈ Ab ∈B
 (i.e., average linkage and ward’s linkage) and generated 4 dif-
ferent sets of hierarchical clustering results. The approach [49]
extended the work [51] (that clustered PD signals by fuzzy C-
means) and applied hierarchical clustering to group PD signals
using Manhattan distance and complete linkage. In [39], 3 types
of cluster distances (e.g., single, average, and complete linkag-
es) were used for hierarchical clustering to separate PD signals.
Hierarchical clustering is especially good for analyzing clus-
ters with inherent structures (e.g., some big clusters contain sub-
clusters). However, it is generally slow with a time complexity
O(n3) (n is the number of instances to be clustered) to build the
full hierarchy. In addition, it is challenging to determine the op-
timal number of clusters for hierarchical clustering. Solutions
for this problem include selecting a distance threshold to cut the
dendrogram [51], predefining the number of clusters, and ex-
ploiting measures for the cluster structures (e.g., the modularity
in [61]).
Summary
Clustering techniques are applied, usually when the labels
of PD sources are not available. Currently, there are two ways
of validating the clustering output. First, computational metrics
were proposed for evaluation, such as intracluster and interclu-
ster distance [39] and normalized mutual information [62]. Sec-
ond, domain knowledge was manually exploited to evaluate the
quality of detected clusters. For example, phase-resolved pat-
terns were used for evaluation as PD pulses from different sourc-
es tend to have distinguished distributions for phase-resolved
patterns [35], [43], [54], [60]. In the future, we are motivated to
transfer such domain knowledge to intelligent algorithms that
work automatically for PD data analysis and evaluation.
In summary, the above clustering methods with certain fea-
ture extraction techniques have been demonstrated to be effec-
tive for separating different PD sources. In the real application,
a user can select a clustering method based on its advantages
and limitations, as well as the clustering validation results. Once
we have multiple sets of clusters identified by various clustering
methods, we would have the opportunity to use ensemble clus-
tering (or consensus clustering) [62], [63]. Ensemble clustering
combines different clustering solutions into a consensus one.
Figure 6. (A) Linear support vector machines and the maximum margin principle; (B) an example of multilayer neural network; and
(C) a decision tree for the mammal classification problem.
30 IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine
As it exploits the complementary nature of individual clustering
methods by leveraging the outputs of them, it generally achieves
better clustering results than its component clustering solutions.
PD Classification
The above PD clustering is an unsupervised process to group
similar PD signals into the same cluster. Here, PD classification
is a general term that refers to the supervised learning process on
labeled signals. It involves various analytic tasks, which include
classifying PD and noise, discriminating multiple PD sources,
assessing the insulation status, diagnosing different types of
transformer failure, and so on. In this section, we introduce three
popular techniques as shown in Figure 6 for PD classification,
namely, support vector machines, neural networks, and decision
tree.
Support Vector Machines (SVM)
SVM is a state-of-the-art classification technique in machine
learning [64], and it has been proven to be one of the best classi-
fiers in many application domains, e.g., image recognition, text
categorization, and so on.
In Figure 6(A), y = wx + b is a linear hyperplane that can be
used for classification, while 2/||w|| is the margin for this hy-
perplane. The basic principle of SVM is to find the maximum-
margin hyperplane, by solving the convex optimization problem
in Equation 11. The first term (1/2)||w||2 in the equation indicates
the margin size, while the second term is the penalty for misclas-
sifying instances (yi is the real label of the ith instance, and w ×
xi + b is the predicted label). The optimization problem can be
solved using quadratic programming [65].
1 m 
2
w * = arg min  w + C  ∑max {0, 1 − yi ⋅ (w ⋅ x i + b )}
w ∈Rn  2
 i =1 
(11)
Figure 6(A) shows a linear case for SVM. To find nonlinear
hyperplanes, various kernel functions can be applied to map the
original input space to higher dimensional space where we can
find linear hyperplanes for classification [64]. Common kernel
functions include polynomial kernel, Gaussian kernel (radial ba-
sis function), and so on.
In [50], SVM was used to identify the insulation defect loca-
tion based on the parameters or features from the PD signals.
The defect location is simplified to indicate whether the defect
is close to a high voltage electrode or low voltage electrode, i.e.,
the defect location is thus a binary label. Polarity and dissym-
metry features from the phase-resolved patterns were then fed
into SVM for predicting the locations of the insulation defects.
In [46], contaminating particles in transformer mineral oils
were separated into four classes based on their length, radius,
and metal type. Features were collected from PD signals gener-
ated by the particle-electrode collision (e.g., the amplitude of PD
pulse and the time interval between PD pulses). SVM was then
applied to classify the contaminating particles.
In [30], [6], [31], SVM was employed to discriminate dif-
ferent types of PD sources. For example in [6], two sets of fea-
tures were generated from the phase-resolved patterns. On both
feature sets, SVM achieved higher accuracy for classifying PD
sources than the other two classification models, back-propaga-
tion neural network and self-organizing map.
Some variants of SVM, e.g., least square SVM [58] and
fuzzy-SVM [7], are used for PD source classification. For least
square SVM, the least square error, i.e., (yi − w ∙ xi − b)2, is used
as the penalty term in Equation 11. For fuzzy-SVM, each data
point has a fuzzy membership so that different input points can
make different contributions for computing the decision hyper-
plane.
Neural Network
Neural networks are machine learning models inspired from
the central nervous systems of animals (e.g., brains). A neural
network generally consists of an input layer, an output layer,
and one or more hidden layers as shown in Figure 6(B) (a neural
network without hidden layer is often denoted as “perceptron”).
The nodes (called “neuron”) in the network connect all the
nodes in preceding and following layers with different weights
(called “synapses”). In addition, each neuron in the input layer
is an input feature while each neuron in the output layer is a pre-
dicted class. A neuron computes a weighted sum of the incom-
ing signals and has a nonlinear activation function to determine
whether it is active or not.
During the training phase, we generally learn a nonlinear
mapping between input and output, which is actually determined
by the weights of edges and neurons in the network. In particu-
lar, the back-propagation algorithm is a common method devel-
oped to learn these weights. These weights learned in the train-
ing phase would be further used for classifying new instances.
Neural network is one of the most popular classification tech-
niques used for PD analysis. In [66], the authors conducted a
comprehensive review of neural network techniques used for PD
analysis before 2003. For example, these two studies [33], [34],
which used neural networks with the statistical features for PD
data analysis, were also reviewed in the above survey. Later on,
various neural network techniques are still widely used for ana-
lyzing PD data in [6], [7], [36], [37], [67]–[69].
November/December — Vol. 31, No. 6 31
In [67], the input data of the neural network was the percent-
ages of gases (e.g., H2, C2H2, and C2H4), which were generated
by DGA. Based on the input, the neural network then classi-
fied the transformer faults as overheating, discharge, and PD.
As shown in their experiments, the trained neural network out-
performed the IEC 60599 criteria [24], which is widely used to
interpret DGA results. Moreover, with the fuzzy rules extracted
from the neural network, the authors provided an improved IEC
table for interpreting DGA results [70].
In [69], the authors first collected 8 types of PD data that
occurred in paper–oil insulation systems impaired by aging pro-
cesses. They then extracted features from frequency and time-
frequency domains for the PD signals. Neural network was fi-
nally used to classify different types of PD. In [36], WPT was
first applied to generate a number of features, and 6 features
were derived by a feature selection strategy. Neural network
was later employed to separate corona and other types of PD.
In addition, back-propagation neural network [6] and a variety
of neural networks, e.g., multilayer perceptron and radial basis
function network [7], were also employed for PD source clas-
sification.
Decision Tree
Decision tree techniques construct a flowchart-like structure
as shown in Figure 6(C) in which internal node represents a test
on a feature, each leaf node represents class label, and a path
from root to leaf represents a classification rule [65]. Decision
tree is constructed in a “top-down” manner, i.e., the root and
later the internal nodes are iteratively split until certain criteria
are met and this tree-growing process terminates. Impurity (for-
mulated by entropy and Gini index) is one of the most popular
measurements used for building a decision tree. The impurity
difference between a node and its child nodes (i.e., information
gain) is used to select the best splitting point of the node. In ad-
dition, we consider a node with impurity lower than a threshold
to be a leaf, and this would be a natural stop-condition for the
tree construction.
Decision tree techniques are widely used for PD-related clas-
sification tasks in various scenarios. In [47], [48], the features
were extracted from the shape of PD pulses, e.g., pulse rising
time, decay time, pulse width, etc. Decision tree on these fea-
tures was employed for classifying the sizes of voids or cavities
in dielectric specimens. In [71], decision tree was used to assess
the depth and size of cavities in high voltage cables. In addition,
decision tree techniques were used for classifying PD signals
and noises in [72] and differentiating multiple PD sources in
[73].
Not like neural network or SVM as black boxes, decision
tree provides us with visible rules of features for classification,
which are simple to understand and interpret.
Summary
A comparative study on PD source classification was pre-
sented in [7], which applied various classification models, e.g.,
fuzzy-SVM and a variety of neural network techniques (two-lay-
er network, multilayer perceptron, radial basis function network,
and so on). Fuzzy-SVM was demonstrated to achieve the best
 performance. In addition, another study on PD source classifi-
cation [6] also showed that SVM achieved better performance
than back-propagation neural network and self-organizing map.
Therefore, these studies provide us with good guidelines to se-
lect classification models.
Moreover, the classification techniques introduced in this sur-
vey (namely, decision tree, neural network, and SVM) are quite
popular for analyzing PD data. In fact, many other classification
techniques have already been used for PD data–related analy-
sis. For example, random forest [74] and evidential reasoning
approaches [75], [76] were used for transformer condition as-
sessment. A bagging algorithm was proposed in [77] for clas-
sifying different types of PD in the transformers. Furthermore,
deep learning techniques [78] have been used as the winning
algorithm for several international pattern recognition contests.
Deep learning techniques for PD data analysis could be explored
in the future.
Last, PD clustering and classification are actually different
learning processes, i.e., unsupervised and supervised learning,
respectively. In specific scenarios, they can work together to
achieve better understanding for PD data. Generally, an input
instance for a PD classification model is an acquisition of signal
with multiple PD pulses from a specific sensor. If multiple PD
pulses from different PD sources are acquired, it would be hard
for a PD classification model to tell the label of such input in-
stance, which can hinder the classification accuracy of the mod-
el. In [31], [58], different clusters are first identified to indicate
different PD sources, and the PD classification model then takes
each cluster as input and recognizes the PD sources in a more
accurate manner.
Conclusions
PD detection and measurement provide an important tool
for assessing the condition of power equipments. In this article,
we have presented a comprehensive survey of the existing tech-
niques used for PD signal sensing, PD feature representation,
and PD classification.
We preserve introductory materials and also discuss the lat-
est development of PD analysis, thus our survey can serve as
a resource of PD analysis for researchers with different back-
grounds. For example, researchers with an electrical engineer-
ing background would quickly get familiar with computational
models for PD data analysis, while those with a computer en-
gineering background are able to learn the basic concepts for
PD sensing and PD feature engineering. This survey also ben-
efits practitioners, engineers, and system architects by equipping
them with an overview of the processing pipeline and the vari-
ous techniques used to detect the important PD signals.
In the future, various research directions can be explored for
PD data analysis. First, as various types of sensors have been
designed for sensing PD data, multimodal sensor system [46],
[14] would leverage the advantages of different sensors for PD
data analysis. Second, PD sensors collect data continuously at
high speed. Stream data mining [79] thus naturally becomes a
good choice for real-time PD data analysis. Third, PD sensors
are deployed at many sites of the power grid, and PD data are
32 IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine
often distributed. Distributed data mining [80] is thus a promis-
ing solution to efficiently and scalably detect PD.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by a research grant, which was
funded by Energy Market Authority, Singapore, with grant ref-
erence: NRF2012EWT-EIRP002-044.
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Min Wu is currently a research scientist
in the Data Analytics Department at the
Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) un-
der the Agency for Science, Technology
and Research (A*STAR), Singapore. He
received the BEng from the University of
Science and Technology of China (USTC),
China, in 2006 and his PhD degree from
Nanyang Technological University, Sin-
gapore, in 2011. His current research interest includes machine
learning, data mining, and bioinformatics.
34 IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine
Hong Cao (S ’08, M ’11) currently heads
the analytics function in McLaren Applied
Technologies, Asia Pacific. Previously, he
was a research scientist and head of the dis-
tributed analytics laboratory in the Institute
for Infocomm Research (I2R), a member
of Singapore’s Agency of Science, Tech-
nology and Research (A*STAR). He re-
ceived the first-class honors BEng, MEng,
and PhD degrees from Nanyang Technological University, Sin-
gapore, in 2001, 2003, and 2010, respectively. His current re-
search interest includes health monitoring for complex systems,
data forensics, mobile data analytics, and machine learning in
applied context. His previous work in image forensics received
the best paper award in IWDW 2010 and the honorary mention
in ISCAS 2010. Recently, he also led teams to win international
and local benchmarking challenges such Opportunity Activ-
ity Recognition Challenge 2011 and Up-Singapore Hackathon
2012. He was part of the winning team for GE FlightQuest 2013.
He currently serves as vice president for IEEE signal processing
society, Singapore section. More information on Cao is available
at https://sites.google.com/site/sstarcao.
Jianneng Cao is a research scientist in the
Data Analytics Department at the Institute
for Infocomm Research (I2R) under the
Agency for Science, Technology and Re-
search (A*STAR), Singapore. He obtained
a PhD degree in computer science from the
National University of Singapore in 2011.
Before joining I2R, he worked at Purdue
University as a postdoc. Jianneng’s main
research interests are data privacy and
stream data management.
Hai-Long Nguyen is a research scientist
in the Data Analytics Department at the In-
stitute for Infocomm Research (I2R) under
the Agency for Science, Technology and
Research (A*STAR), Singapore. He ob-
tained a PhD from Nanyang Technological
University in 2013. He received the first-
class bachelor’s degree from Ho Chi Minh
City University of Technology, Vietnam,
in 2007. His research interests include time series mining, data
stream mining, and big data.
João Bártolo Gomes is a research scien-
tist at the Institute for Infocomm Research
(I2R) under the Agency for Science, Tech-
nology and Research (A*STAR), Singa-
pore. He received his PhD in computer
science from the Technical University of
Madrid (UPM), Spain, in 2011. Previous-
ly, he was a member of the research group
DAME (data mining engineering) at UPM. His research inter-
ests include ubiquitous knowledge discovery, machine learning
algorithms, data stream mining, and learning from evolving data
streams.
Shonali Krishnaswamy received the
bachelor of science degree in computer
science from the University of Madras,
Chennai, India, in 1996 and the master of
computing degree and the PhD degree in
computer science from Monash University,
Australia, in 1998 and 2003, respectively.
She is currently the head of the Data
Analytics Department, Institute for In-
focomm Research (I2R), A*STAR, Singapore. She was the
director of the Centre for Distributed Systems and Software
November/December — Vol. 31, No. 6 35
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Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash Uni-
versity, Melbourne, Australia, where she is currently an associ-
ate professor. She has contributed to around 200 research pa-
pers. Her current research interests include the areas of mobile,
ubiquitous, distributed data mining, and data stream mining. She
is increasingly interested in mobile crowd sensing, mobile user
analytics, and mobile activity recognition. Krishnaswamy was
the recipient of the Monash University Vice-Chancellor’s Award
for Excellence in Research by an Early Career Researcher 2008,
the IBM Innovation Award (unstructure information manage-
ment architecture), the Faculty of Information Technology Early
Career Researcher Award, and an Australian Post-Doctoral Fel-
lowship from the Australian Research Council.