Deep learning-based adversarial multi-classifier optimization for cross-domain machinery fault diagnostics

Despite the recent success in data-driven machinery fault diagnosis, cross-domain diagnostic tasks still remain challenging where the supervised training data and unsupervised testing data are collected under different operating conditions. In order to address the domain shift problem, minimizing the marginal domain distribution discrepancy is considered in most of the existing studies. While improvements have been achieved, the class-level alignments between domains are generally neglected, resulting in deteriorations in testing performance. This paper proposes an adversarial multi-classifier optimization method for cross-domain fault diagnosis based on deep learning. Through adversarial training, the overfitting phenomena of different classifiers are exploited to achieve class-level domain adaptation effects, facilitating extraction of domain-invariant features and development of cross-domain classifiers. Experiments on three rotating machinery datasets are carried out for validations, and the results suggest the proposed method is promising for cross-domain fault diagnostic tasks.