FA-SVR based Soft-Sensor Model of Product Quality in Acetone Refining Duan Ying, Fan Quanyi, Xiong Zhihua (Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084) Abstract: A soft-sensor model of product quality in acetone refining process is proposed by combining factor analysis (FA) and support vector regression (SVR). During the data processing, FA is applied to extract the characteristics of secondary variables and eliminate the collinearity among these variables. The extracted principal factors are then used as input parameters of soft sensor model, and the model is built by using SVR to predict the acetone quality. The experiment results on the real industrial data show that the method of FA-SVR is more effective than robust regression and neural network methods. Keywords: Soft sensor; Support vector regression (SVR); Factor Analysis (FA) ; Acetone refining