Dynamic simulation-assisted Gaussian mixture alignment approach for fault diagnosis of rotation machinery under small samples

Abstract

Obtaining a substantial number of actual samples for rotating machinery in an industrial setting can be challenging, particularly when faulty samples are acquired under hazardous working conditions. The issue of insufficient samples hinders the effective training of reliable fault diagnosis models, impeding the industrial implementation of advanced intelligent methods. This study proposes an innovative Dynamic Simulation-assisted Gaussian Mixture Alignment model (DSGMA) to address the challenge of applying fault diagnosis technologies, with its performance mined by advanced transfer algorithms. Specifically, we establish a fault dynamics model for rotating machinery and acquire a substantial amount of simulated data as the source domain to facilitate the training of the deep neural network model. Subsequently, we propose a Gaussian mixture-guided domain alignment approach that assigns a domain-independent Gaussian distribution to each category as prior knowledge, with the parameters calculated using limited actual samples. Diagnostic knowledge is transferred from the source domain to the target domain by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the features of the simulated samples and the Gaussian mixture priors. Furthermore, the DSGMA model incorporates Gaussian clustering loss to augment the clustering capability of samples belonging to the same category from real devices and enhances the computational stability of the parameters in the Gaussian mixture model. The efficacy of the DSGMA method is validated using three publicly available datasets and compared against five widely adopted methods. The experimental findings illustrate that DSGMA exhibits superior diagnostic and robust capabilities, facilitating efficient fault diagnosis under scenarios of small samples.