Predictive maintenance might not be an AI application that seizes the public’s imagination, but is one that is delivering real cost savings and business benefits. It is also a fertile proving ground for algorithms that deal with dirty data, where the challenge is to extract meaningful trends from a lot of background noise. MachineMetrics, based in Northampton, Massachusetts and founded in 2014 with $2.1 million raised so far, is one start-up targeting AI based predictive analytics for machine tools. It has combined a traditional rule-based approach capable of recognizing known conditions that might be indicative of problems or failures with unsupervised machine learning to identify relevant anomalous behavior. The latter has been shown capable of detecting impending faults in…