Fault diagnostics of roller bearing using kernel based neighborhood score multi-class support vector machine

Roller bearing is one of the most widely used rotary elements in a rotary machine. The roller bearing's nature of vibration reveals its condition and the features that show the nature are to be extracted through some indirect means. Statistical parameters like kurtosis, standard deviation, maximum value, etc. form a set of features, which are widely used in fault diagnostics. Finding out good features that discriminate the different fault conditions of the bearing is often a problem. Selection of good features is an important phase in pattern recognition and requires detailed domain knowledge. This paper addresses the feature selection process using decision tree and uses kernel based neighborhood score multi-class support vector machine (MSVM) for classification. The vibration signal from a piezoelectric transducer is captured for the following conditions: good bearing, bearing with inner race fault, bearing with outer race fault, and inner and outer race faults. The statistical features are extracted therefrom and classified successfully using MSVM. The results of MSVM are compared with and binary support vector machine (SVM). (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.