A comparative study of feature selection for hidden Markov model-based micro-milling tool wear monitoring

This paper presents a discriminant feature selection approach for hidden Markov model (HMM) modeling of micro-milling tool conditions. The approach is compared with other popular feature selection methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) and automatic relevance determination (ARD) according to their HMM classification rate. In tool condition monitoring (TCM), there are a lot of features that contain redundant information or less sensitive to tool state discrimination. These features are expected to be deleted for less computation and more robust modeling of tool conditions. Fisher's linear discriminant analysis (FDA) is modified for this purpose. The FDA is generally used for classification, and the features are mapped to another space and lose their physical meanings. In the modified discriminant feature selection, the features are selected in the original feature space by maximizing tool state separation and ranked by their separation ability between different tool states. Experimental results from both micro-milling of copper and steel under different working conditions indicate that the FDA is superior to both PCA and ARD for feature selection in HMM's classification. The reasons behind these differences are also discussed.