  Detecting early signs of failures (anomalies) in complex systems is one of
the main goal of preventive maintenance. It allows in particular to avoid
actual failures by (re)scheduling maintenance operations in a way that
optimizes maintenance costs. Aircraft engine health monitoring is one
representative example of a field in which anomaly detection is crucial.
Manufacturers collect large amount of engine related data during flights which
are used, among other applications, to detect anomalies. This article
introduces and studies a generic methodology that allows one to build automatic
early signs of anomaly detection in a way that builds upon human expertise and
that remains understandable by human operators who make the final maintenance
decision. The main idea of the method is to generate a very large number of
binary indicators based on parametric anomaly scores designed by experts,
complemented by simple aggregations of those scores. A feature selection method
is used to keep only the most discriminant indicators which are used as inputs
of a Naive Bayes classifier. This give an interpretable classifier based on
interpretable anomaly detectors whose parameters have been optimized indirectly
by the selection process. The proposed methodology is evaluated on simulated
data designed to reproduce some of the anomaly types observed in real world
engines.
