Deep convolution variational autoencoder network based transfer learning strategy for fault diagnosis

Bearing is one of the core components of any rotating machine, and its failure is widespread. This reason drives continuous monitoring and detecting bearing faults during machine operation to warn operators and prevent unforeseen damage. This paper proposes an intelligent Passive Thermography (PTG) based fault diagnosis technique for detection of bearing faults using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Transfer Learning (TL) under varying working conditions. The validation of the proposed method has been done on three different datasets; bearing test rig dataset has been taken as a source domain data while Induction Motor (IM), and Machine Fault Simulator (MFS) datasets have been taken as target domain data. The proposed method enables and speeds up the training process of CNN towards accurate adaptation for fault diagnosis approach in the escalated time frame. The experimental results demonstrated that the suggested approach could successfully learn transferable characteristics from the source domain model, which can cope with the issue of limited availability of training data required for the target domain. The classification accuracy on the target domain dataset were varied in the range of 89 -95.4 % in the case of the IM dataset and 96.5-97.5% in the case of the MFS dataset. Moreover, it shows the benefits of the suggested method, which may be utilized as an effective non-invasive diagnostic tool for rotating machines to avoid unexpected system shutdowns.

Bearing is an important component in mechanical equipment. Its main function is to support the rotating mechanical body and reduce the friction coefficient and axial load. In the actual operating environment, the bearings are affected by complex working conditions and other factors. Therefore, it is very difficult to effectively obtain data that meets the conditions of independent and identical distribution of training data and test data, which result in unsatisfactory fault diagnosis results. As a transfer learning method, joint distribution adaptive (JDA) can effectively solve the learning problem of inconsistent distribution of training data and test data. In this paper, a new bearing fault diagnosis method based on JDA and deep belief network (DBN) with improved sparrow search algorithm (CWTSSA), namely JACADN is proposed. In the JACADN, the JDA is employed to carry out feature transfer between the source domain samples and target domain samples, that is, the source domain samples and target domain samples are mapped into the same feature space by the kernel function. Then the maximum mean difference is used as the metric to reduce the joint distribution difference between the samples in the two domains. Aiming at the parameter selection of the DBN, an improved sparrow search algorithm (CWTSSA) with global optimization ability is used to optimize the parameters of the DBN in order to construct an optimized DBN model. The obtained source domain samples and target domain samples are divided into training set and test set, which are input the optimized DBN to construct a bearing fault diagnosis model for improving the diagnosis accuracy. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by vibration data of QPZZ-II rotating machinery. The experimental results show that the proposed JACADN method can effectively improve the fault diagnosis accuracy of rolling bearings under variable operating conditions.

Machine Learning (ML) methods have been widely used in Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). In particular, many botnet detection methods are based on ML. However, due to the fast-evolving nature of network security threats, it is necessary to frequently retrain the ML tools with up-to-date data, especially because data labeling takes a long time and requires a lot of effort, making it difficult to generate training data. We propose transfer learning as a more effective approach for botnet detection, as it can learn from well curated source data and transfer the knowledge to a target problem domain not seen before. We devise an approach that is effective regardless whether or not the data from the target domain is labeled. More specifically, we train a neural network with the Recurrrent Variation Autoencoder (RVAE) structure on the source data, and use RVAE to compute anomaly scores for data records from the target domain. In an evaluation of this transfer learning framework, we use CTU-13 dataset as a source domain and a fresh set of network monitoring data as a target domain. Tests show that the proposed transfer learning method is able to detect botnets better than semi-supervised learning method that was trained on the target domain data. The area under Receiver Operating Characteristic is 0.810 for transfer learning, and 0.779 for directly using RVAE on the target domain data.

Deep convolution domain-adversarial transfer learning for fault diagnosis of rolling bearings

Machine learning methods have made great development in data-driven fault diagnosis of rolling bearings. But the intelligent fault diagnosis of intershaft bearing faces the following two dilemmas: 1) the fault vibration is extremely weak, and it is difficult to extract features that can distinguish different classes; 2) due to the complex and variable working condition, the intershaft bearing does not always fail in same working conditions. That is, the labeled training data is not sufficient for every source domain. These challenges lead to the failure of traditional machine learning based fault diagnosis for intershaft bearings. Therefore, a novel intelligent fault diagnosis scheme is investigated for intershaft bearings of dual-rotor equipment under variable working conditions. The paper focuses on two key issues: 1) developing a feature extraction approach with which the fault features with excellent clustering and separation are extracted from vibration signals. This approach addresses the dilemma of weak fault feature extraction of intershaft bearing and creates a feasible precondition for subsequent feature transfer; 2) proposing a feature transfer method transforming the labeled sample features in multiple source domains into the trainable sample features in the target domain. This new transfer achieves the sharing of labeled training samples under working conditions and enriches the trainable samples in target domain. Ultimately, the faults of intershaft bearings can be diagnosed with the help of the neural network classifier trained by the transferred samples with labels. Experimental results verify that this established scheme is effective and superior to other comparable methods for the transfer diagnosis task from multiple source domains to target domain.

To address the issues of negative transfer and reduced stability in transfer learning models for rolling bearing fault diagnosis under variable working conditions, an unsupervised multi-adversarial transfer learning fault diagnosis algorithm based on bearing dynamics simulation data is proposed. Firstly, the algorithm constructs both a global domain classifier and a subdomain classifier. In the subdomain classifier, the simulated vibration signal, which contains rich bearing fault label information, is generated by constructing dynamic equations to replace the label prediction of target domain data, thereby achieving alignment of marginal and conditional distributions. Simultaneously, an improved loss function with embedded maximum mean discrepancy is designed to reduce the feature distribution gap between source and target domain data. Finally, a weight allocation mechanism for source domain and simulation domain samples is developed to promote positive transfer and suppress negative transfer. Experiments were conducted using the Paderborn University dataset and the Huazhong University of Science and Technology dataset, achieving accuracy rates of 89.457% and 96.436%, respectively. The results show that, in comparison with existing unsupervised cross-domain fault diagnosis methods, the proposed method demonstrates significant improvements in diagnostic accuracy and stability, demonstrating its superiority in rolling bearing fault diagnosis under variable operational conditions.

The current damage is the most stubborn and difficult fault of high-power motor bearings because its vibration characteristics are easily confused with those of ordinary bearing mechanical faults. If it is discriminated as an ordinary mechanical fault without electrical insulation protection, the current damage of bearing shafts will still repeatedly appear. Aiming at the problem that it is difficult to identify the bearing current damage fault under variable working conditions, a bearing shaft current damage identification method based on multiscale feature label propagation and manifold metric transfer (MFLP-MMT) is proposed. Firstly, the multiscale sub-band signal is obtained by wavelet packet decomposition, and the multiscale sub-band fuzzy entropy is obtained by calculating its fuzzy entropy. Then, according to the extracted features, a neighbor graph is constructed on the source domain of the known fault label to obtain the pseudo label of the target domain sample, and the source domain label information is gradually diffused by way of the graph label propagation. The multiscale sub-band fuzzy entropy of the sample is mapped to the low-dimensional manifold space by locality preserving projections (LPP), and the source domain samples close to the target domain are given higher weights by cross-domain density ratio estimation to solve the problem of domain offset. Combined with the label samples of the target domain in label propagation, the manifold distance metric is learned to minimize the intra-class distance and maximize the inter-class distance in the domain and eliminate the overlapping phenomenon in the domain. By increasing the range of label propagation after each iteration, the label propagation error of the leading graph is gradually reduced, and unsupervised metric transfer learning is realized. The experimental results show that the new method is superior to the semi-supervised transfer learning method in fault identification ability; the highest fault identification accuracy can reach 100% and it has a good robustness.

Robust and reliable drivetrain is important for preventing electromechanical (e.g., wind turbine) downtime. In recent years, advanced machine learning (ML) techniques including deep learning have been introduced to improve fault diagnosis performance for electromechanical systems. However, electromechanical systems (e.g., wind turbine) operate in varying working conditions, meaning that the distribution of the test data (in the target domain) is different from the training data used for model training, and the diagnosis performance of an ML method may become downgraded for practical applications. This paper proposes a joint distribution optimal deep domain adaptation approach (called JDDA) based auto-encoder deep classifier for fault diagnosis of electromechanical drivetrains under the varying working conditions. First, the representative features are extracted by the deep auto-encoder. Then, the joint distribution adaptation is used to implement the domain adaptation, so the classifier trained with the source domain features can be used to classify the target domain data. Lastly, the classification performance of the proposed JDDA is tested using two test-rig datasets, compared with three traditional machine learning methods and two domain adaptation approaches. Experimental results show that the JDDA can achieve better performance compared with the reference machine learning, deep learning and domain adaptation approaches.

It is considerable to solve practical fault diagnosis task of gearbox under variable working conditions by introducing sufficient auxiliary data. For this purpose, a new approach called improved deep transfer auto-encoder is proposed for intelligent diagnosis of gearbox faults under variable working conditions with small training samples. First, multi-wavelet is employed as activation function for effectively learning useful features hidden in the non-stationary vibration data. Second, correntropy is used to modify the cost function to enhance the reconstruction quality. Third, pre-train an improved deep auto-encoder using sufficient auxiliary data in the source domain, and transfer its parameters to the target model. Finally, the improved deep transfer should be fine-tuned by small training samples in the target domain to adapt to the characteristics of the rest testing data. The proposed approach is used to analyze two sets of experimental vibration data collected from gearbox under variable working conditions. The results show that the proposed approach can accurately diagnose different faults of gearbox even the working conditions have significant changes, which is superior to the existing methods.

The concept of Industry 4.0 uses cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things to create "smart factories" that enable automated and connected production. However, the complex and diverse nature of cyber-physical systems makes them vulnerable to physical threats, where any fault in their physical components can lead to serious consequences, from financial losses to human safety. To reduce the risk of such failures, it is essential to have techniques in place to monitor the condition of these physical components closely. In recent years, data-driven predictive maintenance methods have become common due to the growth in data and advancements in machine learning. This thesis focuses on fault diagnosis, a key part of predictive maintenance, which aims to detect and identify faults in physical components. Incorporating advanced techniques, including machine learning algorithms and sensor data analysis, enhanced fault diagnosis systems' accuracy and efficiency. However, several real-world barriers challenge the effectiveness of these techniques. This research is structured around three primary objectives. The first objective aims to establish an efficient fault diagnosis system that is highly sensitive to fault occurrences while being resilient to uncertainties such as variability in fault patterns and data imbalance. To address variability in fault patterns, we developed a multi-step approach integrating clustering techniques and an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system, which significantly improved diagnosis robustness even under noisy conditions. For imbalanced datasets, a two-step method was introduced, combining permutation entropy for fault detection and envelope analysis for fault isolation. This approach was enhanced by an automatic frequency band selection method leveraging wavelet transform and statistical criteria, resulting in high fault diagnosis accuracy and reliability, even with limited labeled faulty data. The second objective focuses on developing fault diagnosis systems that can maintain high performance despite domain shifts and limited training data in both source and target domains. To address the challenge of domain shifts, a transfer learning technique was introduced, and a systematic literature review was conducted. This study bridges a technical gap by providing a comprehensive taxonomy, state-of-the-art methods, and insights into the challenges of applying transfer learning to predictive maintenance. Additionally, a conceptual framework was proposed to explore scenarios for transferring diagnostic knowledge from different source domains to target domains with insufficient training datasets. In a subsequent study, a new diagnostic framework was developed using digital twins and partial transfer learning to address the lack of real training datasets in both source and target domains as well as label space inconsistencies between them. The framework includes a general approach for developing digital twins of real machines to generate synthetic diagnostic data as source domain data. Furthermore, by incorporating a deep learning network and a double-layer attention mechanism, a partial transfer learning diagnostic model was developed to transfer diagnostic knowledge from the digital twin to the real target domain despite label space inconsistencies. The proposed framework was validated through an industrial case study involving rolling bearings in rotating equipment. The third objective focuses on developing an efficient fault diagnosis system capable of maintaining reliability under unseen and evolving working conditions. To achieve this, a novel self-adaptive fault diagnosis system was proposed, incorporating the MAPE-K loop, a domain generalization network model, and digital twin technologies. This self-adaptive fault diagnosis system leverages the MAPE-K loop to adapt in real time to evolving working conditions. Digital twins were employed to continuously generate data aligned with the real system’s operational context, enabling accurate fault diagnosis in dynamic environments. The domain generalization network model enhances generalization to unseen target working conditions by addressing overfitting and feature loss through multi-domain data augmentation, adversarial learning, and domain discrepancy modules. Validation using multiple rotating machinery datasets demonstrated that the developed fault diagnosis system outperformed state-of-the-art methods across various scenarios. In summary, this dissertation proposes a comprehensive and practical approach to addressing variability in fault patterns, imbalance datasets, data scarcity, domain shifts, and unseen and evolving working conditions challenges in existing fault diagnosis systems.

This research investigates the intelligent fault diagnosis of rotating machinery in a cross domain context. Due to the interference of operating condition or structural differences of mechanical components, there is a certain deviation between the source and target domain dataset, manifested in different input feature spaces or edge probability distributions, which leads to significant errors in the pattern recognition under target domain. In order to address the above issues, this research proposes an intelligent fault diagnosis method based on class confusion constraint mechanism and transferable batch normalization algorithm. Introduce transferable batch normalization algorithm to differentiate the distribution characteristics of source domain data and target domain data, and performs flexible data standardization to preserve the intrinsic features of different domain data. In addition, a target domain classification confusion constraint is formulated. While seeking to align the feature subspaces of the source and target domains, the discriminative information in the target domain samples that is conducive to fault mode classification is maximally preserved, thereby achieving more accurate classification and identification of rolling bearing faults.

Fault diagnosis plays a very important role in ensuring the safe and reliable operations of machines. Currently, the deep learning-based fault diagnosis is attracting increasing attention. However, fault diagnosis under variable working conditions has been a significant challenge due to the domain discrepancy problem. This problem is also unavoidable in deep learning-based fault diagnosis methods. This paper contributes to the ongoing investigation by proposing a new approach for the fault diagnosis under variable working conditions based on STFT and transfer deep residual network (TDRN). The STFT was employed to convert vibration signal to time-frequency image as the input of the TDRN. To address the domain discrepancy problem, the TDRN was developed in this paper. Unlike traditional deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) methods, by combining with transfer learning, the TDRN can make a bridge between two different working conditions, thereby using the knowledge learned from a working condition to achieve a high classification accuracy in another working condition. Moreover, since the residual learning is introducing, the TDRN can overcome the problems of training difficulty and performance degradation existing in traditional DCNN methods, thus further improving the classification accuracy. Experiments are conducted on the popular CWRU bearing dataset to validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. The results show that the developed TDRN outperforms those methods without transfer learning and/or residual learning in terms of the accuracy and feature learning ability for the fault diagnosis under variable working conditions.

With the development of deep learning methods, the data-driven fault diagnosis methods have attracted a great deal of interest. However, as for the data-driven fault diagnosis methods, technology has to overcome various difficulties in the practical industrial scenarios, such as variable working conditions, insufficient effective samples, and environmental noise interference. Combining with the time–frequency analysis of vibration signals, a domain adaptation fault diagnosis model based on ResNet and Transformer (DAFDMRT) is proposed in this work, aiming to solve the problems encountered by current rotating machinery fault diagnosis methods in the field of application. Firstly, the vibration signal is processed by wavelet packet transform and the time–frequency information grayscale maps is constructed. Next, a deep fusion feature extraction network combining ResNet and Transformer encoder, is designed for the extraction and fusion of the local and global features of multi-scale time–frequency information. Finally, the multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy is applied to measure and minimize the distribution difference between the deep features of source and target domain, thereby improving the diagnostic performance of the diagnosis model in variable working conditions. In this work, comparative experiments are conducted as for bearing and gearbox datasets under variable working conditions. The results indicate that DAFDMRT can show excellent performances in terms of fault diagnosis and generalization ability.

Recent progress in machine learning has been mainly due to the availability of large amounts of annotated data used for training complex models with deep architectures. Annotating this training data becomes burdensome and creates a major bottleneck in maintaining machine-learning databases. Moreover, these trained models fail to generalize to new categories or new varieties of the same categories. This is because new categories or new varieties have data distribution different from the training data distribution. To tackle these problems, this thesis proposes to develop a family of transfer-learning techniques that can deal with different training (source) and testing (target) distributions with the assumption that the availability of annotated data is limited in the testing domain. This is done by using the auxiliary data-abundant source domain from which useful knowledge is transferred that can be applied to data-scarce target domain. This transferable knowledge serves as a prior that biases target-domain predictions and prevents the target-domain model from overfitting. Specifically, we explore structural priors that encode relational knowledge between different data entities, which provides more informative bias than traditional priors. The choice of the structural prior depends on the information availability and the similarity between the two domains. Depending on the domain similarity and the information availability, we divide the transfer learning problem into four major categories and propose different structural priors to solve each of these sub-problems. This thesis first focuses on the unsupervised-domain-adaptation problem, where we propose to minimize domain discrepancy by transforming labeled source-domain data to be close to unlabeled target-domain data. For this problem, the categories remain the same across the two domains and hence we assume that the structural relationship between the source-domain samples is carried over to the target domain. Thus, graph or hyper-graph is constructed as the structural prior from both domains and a graph/hyper-graph matching formulation is used to transform samples in the source domain to be closer to samples in the target domain. An efficient optimization scheme is then proposed to tackle the time and memory inefficiencies associated with the matching problem. The few-shot learning problem is studied next, where we propose to transfer knowledge from source-domain categories containing abundantly labeled data to novel categories in the target domain that contains only few labeled data. The knowledge transfer biases the novel category predictions and prevents the model from overfitting. The knowledge is encoded using a neural-network-based prior that transforms a data sample to its corresponding class prototype. This neural network is trained from the source-domain data and applied to the target-domain data, where it transforms the few-shot samples to the novel-class prototypes for better recognition performance. The few-shot learning problem is then extended to the situation, where we do not have access to the source-domain data but only have access to the source-domain class prototypes. In this limited information setting, parametric neural-network-based priors would overfit to the source-class prototypes and hence we seek a non-parametric-based prior using manifolds. A piecewise linear manifold is used as a structural prior to fit the source-domain-class prototypes. This structure is extended to the target domain, where the novel-class prototypes are found by projecting the few-shot samples onto the manifold. Finally, the zero-shot learning problem is addressed, which is an extreme case of the few-shot learning problem where we do not have any labeled data in the target domain. However, we have high-level information for both the source and target domain categories in the form of semantic descriptors. We learn the relation between the sample space and the semantic space, using a regularized neural network so that classification of the novel categories can be carried out in a common representation space. This same neural network is then used in the target domain to relate the two spaces. In case we want to generate data for the novel categories in the target domain, we can use a constrained generative adversarial network instead of a traditional neural network. Thus, we use structural priors like graphs, neural networks and manifolds to relate various data entities like samples, prototypes and semantics for these different transfer learning sub-problems. We explore additional post-processing steps like pseudo-labeling, domain adaptation and calibration and enforce algorithmic and architectural constraints to further improve recognition performance. Experimental results on standard transfer learning image recognition datasets produced competitive results with respect to previous work. Further experimentation and analyses of these methods provided better understanding of machine learning as well.

Motor-bearing fault diagnosis is critical for industrial equipment reliability, yet traditional data-driven methods require extensive labeled data, which are often scarce in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a Transformer transfer learning network (TTLN) for accurate fault diagnosis under cross-condition scenarios, particularly when target domain data are limited. First, we develop a Transformer-based fault diagnosis model that captures long-range dependencies in sequential data through self-attention, achieving high accuracy under single operating conditions. Second, we introduce the TTLN framework, which integrates domain adaptation to align marginal and conditional distributions, enabling robust cross-condition fault diagnosis with minimal target domain samples. Finally, we validated the proposed method on the CWRU and PU datasets, demonstrating the TTLN’s superior performance in data-scarce scenarios. For example, the TTLN achieved over 95% accuracy with only 100 target samples, outperforming traditional methods and fine-tuning-based approaches. The results underscore the TTLN’s effectiveness in cross-condition fault diagnosis, offering a practical solution for industrial applications with limited labeled data.