An intelligent fault diagnosis method of rotating machinery using L1-regularized sparse filtering

Abstract

Traditional intelligent fault diagnosis methods take advantage of diagnostic expertise but are labor-intensive and time-consuming. Among various unsupervised feature extraction methods, sparse filtering computes fast and has less hyperparameters. However, the standard sparse filtering has poor generalization ability and the extracted features are not so discriminative by only constraining the sparsity of the feature matrix. Therefore, an improved sparse filtering with L1 regularization (L1SF) is proposed to improve the generalization ability by improving the sparsity of the weight matrix, which can extract more discriminative features. Based on Fourier transformation (FFT), L1SF, softmax regression, a new three-stage intelligent fault diagnosis method of rotating machinery is developed. It first transforms time-domain samples into frequency-domain samples by FFT, then extracts features in L1-regularized sparse filtering and finally identifies the health condition in softmax regression. Meanwhile, we propose employing different activation functions in the optimization of L1SF and feedforward for considering their different requirements of the non-saturating and anti-noise properties. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by a bearing dataset and a gearbox dataset respectively. Through comparisons with the standard sparse filtering and L2-regularized sparse filtering, the superiority of the proposed method is verified. Finally, an interpretation of the weight matrix is given and two useful sparse properties of weight matrix are defined, which explain the effectiveness of L1SF.