A methodological integration of fisher score technique with intelligent machine learning methods for ball bearing fault investigation

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient approach to detect, diagnose and estimate the severity of failures in various components of bearings in induction motors using vibration signature analysis. This automated method integrates the Fisher Score feature selection method and an efficient hyperparameter tuning model with machine learning models, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) and Decision Tree (DT), to accurately classify defects in bearings. This approach ensures accurate classification of bearing defects within a reduced computation time. This work is carried out with recorded vibration signals from a laboratory experimental setup on Machine Fault Simulator (MFS), focusing on ball bearing with defects in inner race, outer race and ball itself. Time and Frequency domain analysis are employed to compute the features for fault investigation in ball bearings using machine learning models. The computed results demonstrate that the proposed feature selection method with hyperparameter tuning achieved remarkable maximum accuracy among X, Y and XY combinations of datasets, with 97% in DT, 94% in SVM and 95.23% in k-NN models during the frequency domain analysis. Notably, these model accuracies improved to 99.04% in DT, 98% in SVM and 98% in k-NN during further analysis with Fisher Score technique. Consequently, the testing loss using this hyperparameter tuning function remains very low. Overall, this paper compares the results of time and frequency domain analysis and introduces a promising approach for both efficient and accurate fault detection and severity estimation in bearings of induction motors, potentially reducing the need for extensive manpower and sensor usage.