Abstract
The microbial fermentation process often involves various biological metabolic reactions and chemical processes. The mixed bacterial culture process of 2-keto-l-gulonic acid has strong nonlinear and time-varying characteristics. In this study, a probabilistic Bayesian deep learning approach is proposed to obtain a highly accurate and robust prediction of product formation. The Bayesian optimized deep neural network (BODNN) is utilized as basic model for prediction, the structural parameters of which are optimized. Then, the training datasets are classified into different categories according to the prior evaluation of prediction error. The final forecasting is a weighted combination of BODNN models based on the Bayesian hybrid method. The weights can be interpreted as Bayesian posterior probabilities and are computed recursively. The validation of 95 industrial batches is carried out, and the average root mean square errors are 1.51 and 2.01% for 4 and 8 h ahead prediction, respectively. The results illustrate that the proposed approach can capture the dynamics of fermentation batches and is suitable for online process monitoring.