An improved principal component analysis (PCA) method is applied for sensor fault detection and isolation (FDI) in a nuclear power plant (NPP) in this paper. Data pre-processing and false alarm reducing methods are combined with general PCA method to improve the model performance in practice. In data pre-processing, singular points and random fluctuations in the original data are eliminated with various techniques respectively. In fault detecting, a statistics-based method is proposed to reduce the false alarms of T2 and Q statistics. | Improved PCA method for sensor fault detection and isolation in a nuclear power plant