LAUSR

Abstract The refrigerant leakage would occur in a multi-split variable refrigerant flow (VRF) system after years of operation, thus contributing to the inefficient operation and even increased energy consumption. Diagnosing the refrigerant charge amount (RCA) malfunction in time is of great necessity to ensure the normal operation of VRF system and avoid superfluous energy waste. This paper proposes an efficient online weighted k-Nearest-Neighbor model (wkNN) strategy to diagnose the RCA malfunction of the VRF system, which is based on the coupled feature selection method. The minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevance (mRMR) algorithm is first applied to derive the subset of features that have the maximum correlation with the target category and the minimum redundancy among each other. The ReliefF algorithm is utilized to rank variables in descending order. Final variables importance is ascertained on the basis of the average weighs of importance of variables and contributions of variables to the model's classification error rate. Correlation analysis (CA) is implemented to verify the rationality of the selected variables. Finally, a subset of six variables is served as the input variables to establish three kinds of models. Results indicate that the coupled feature selection method outperforms the single feature selection method, and the proposed wkNN model based on the coupled feature selection method is superior to the other two models and achieves desirable diagnostic performance on both experimental and practical data.