Deep transfer learning for rolling bearing fault diagnosis under variable operating conditions

Rolling bearings are the vital components of rotary machines. The collected data of rolling bearing have strong noise interference, massive unlabeled samples, and different fault features. Thus, a deep transfer learning method is proposed for rolling bearings fault diagnosis under variable operating conditions. To obtain robust feature representation, the denoising autoencoder is used to denoise and reduce dimension of unlabeled rolling bearing signals. For those unlabeled target domain signals, a feature matching method based on multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancies between source domain and target domain is adopted to get enough labeled target domain samples. Then, these rolling bearing signals are converted to multi-dimensional graph samples and fed into a convolutional neural network model for fault diagnosis. To improve the generalization of convolutional neural network under variable operating conditions, we combine model-based transfer learning with feature-based transfer learning to initialize and optimize the convolutional neural network parameters. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through several comparative experiments of Case Western Reserve University data. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can learn features adaptively from noisy data and increase the accuracy rate by 2%-8% comparing with other models.